Google lays off its Python team
social.coop
social.coop
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 sustainability if they intend to retain top talent because morale is non-uniformly, moderately miserable due to the actions of multiple rounds of layoffs creating unbounded uncertainty, vague bizword slogans, and cheap perk cutbacks.
Now its one of the largest programs on the east coast. Its cool that more people appreciate the field but as a small kid, I decided that I would have gone into this field even if it did not pay the big bucks so it was a no brainer when I enrolled.
Once it's a woke shithole no one important will work there. You can fleece them for money but no one capable of material contribution goes to google.
Consider what was their last usable innovation? Making their web email client less usable? A third-rate cloud service? They don't even have a usable quantum computer; just a toy. Their flagship product is a pay-to-censured search engine. It's a giant company of assholes.
Sure, the acronym doesn’t mean anything anymore, but at least everyone knows what it means.
Edit: Personally I'm in favor of sorting by present market cap, so it's MANGAM.
Then we can go with Meta Apple Google Amazon, or MAGA for short. Ok, not a good look that one.
Netflix is the only employer I know of where an Android or iOS IC can make liquid 500k+ TC without RSUs.
Are they trying to show that India's workplace is more compliant and they'll just do what corp types will tell them?
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
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.
Apparently weekends don't exist for you?
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 as anywhere else.
Google replaced long-term workers with these contractors to evade labor laws. There are over 275k workers on H1 visas in Santa Clara county alone. Those contracts end & Google replaces them with lower paid positions doing the same work. This is why Google's products don't work as well & also why it can no longer compete or innovate. Google's terrible AI is not the reason for these layoffs. Google's mass layoff have a chilling effect on workers. The message is that if they make any waves or stand up for their rights, they will be replaced. The goal is not to innovate. The goal is to cut costs while minimally maintaining products the entire world is forced to use. Since users have no options, they dont need good products.
I am sure workers try as hard as they can due to the massive power imbalance of having your citizenship status tied to your job. Tech has literally replaced the population of an entire region with H1 visas for one reason only, to cut costs. After starting a severe homeless crisis & destroying a state, Google is now moving to the cheap labor in India & Mexico. This is called transnationalism & US corporations have been doing since the 70s. It might seem like this could be good for India, but Google has no interest in bringing India up. Google only wants to make sure it always has a cheap, desperate pool of labor to exploit. This is the real reason for Googles constant layoffs. Google has been breaking US antitrust & tax laws for years. Its now blatantly breaking US labor laws & neither CA or the US govt cares. The US seems to be more interested in protecting the worst monopoly in history. The only reason Google makes money is by selling user data to anyone & with predatory ads. I am certain US enemies are very aware of the huge data breach thats likely to happen through the sketchy staffing agencies Google uses & the sheer number of unvetted temporary employees that revolve in and out of Googles doors.
This is a huge topic.
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.
The language is so good and well known that they don't need a dedicated team to do these activites you talked about?
Or are they hiring cheaper workers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125#40176438
I don't understand such a move, because all AI is developed in pytorch. I think that google uses JAX and pytorch.
It does not make sense at all. Python cython is a complex ecosystem. It is very difficult for new engineers to pick up speed.
Do you think there is some priority change? Like more focus on internal use case, instead of upstream contribution?
Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products
All AI is written with Python.
Google lays off all Python team.
Segmentation fault
Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
The problem with Tech layoffs is not that they weren't doing important work, it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
You're mistaking their intent, they are actually okay with less work being done. It's a desire to simply hit the reset button and see how much money they can save, and how much they need to build up the team again. They know it harms productivity but maybe something cheaper will come out of it. They are gambling.
Edit: I guess I'm not sure on whether large training runs count as prod or not. They're certainly expensive and mission critical.
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 commits made by a human [3] even after 2 days of leaving the team, though I see the next person only needs 4 more :)
[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/ai-powered-fuzzing-b... [2]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/10/increasing-transpare... [3]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors
Good luck!
To that end, focus heavily on whatever exists in the vertex of what you're good at (which did you like and excel at of those things you did?) and a growth area (example: Python, C++ and the multitudinous ways they continue to be used together in AI etc).
So you have to look at what existing leverage you have and build upon that foundation. It will be very difficult to get a role without getting some hands on experience back first, so where I'd start is, could you step down to become IC at your current job? I'd be more interested to evaluate a candidate doing Python/Kotlin that wants to move into something adjacent than someone in management who just wants to be a dev again.
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
Only high-level is written in python, low level is Cuda that is a form of C.
Also, you would think the first to replace workers with AI would be the AI companies like Google.
Google is an ad first company
FTFY
Next comes YELLING-LOUDLY-TO-COME-DOWN-TO-THE-LOCAL-CAR-DEALERSHIP-FOR-NO-MONEY-DOWN-OFFERS phase of advertisements, which type are also routinely and nearly uniformly ignored.
Is Google using JS for the backend ad serving / AI?
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]
Having a well-maintained Python tooling is essential for _any_ company who does AI. While smaller companies can get away with open source solutions, for bigger companies it is unavoidable to have teams dedicated to maintaining and supporting Python tooling.
This announcement is troubling, and may indicate one of the two: 1) Google is in dire situation, and there is no more fat to cut, so they are starting to cut muscle. 2) Google management is clueless and cannot discriminate between fat and muscle.
They've been trying to focus on AI, but with moves like this, their position in AI will likely end up matching their position in Cloud vs AWS/Azure.
It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else?
Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.
Also, Google is IBM at this point, so I would expect a lot of IBM-like moves.
From where I sit (SRE), I see a lot of Python which is very much mission critical.
I never saw Python actually get used, though, in the projects I worked on.
First, there are two SRE ladders: SRE-SWE and SRE-SysEng. SRE-SWE have the same interviews and hiring bar as SWEs. SysEng have less coding interviews but I think the interview questions are more practical and less algorithm oriented.
Still, SREs are subject to the same rules and policies as SWEs when it comes to submitting code.
And in the end, I don't see why using python on some projects would be a bad engineering practice
Google can definitely afford (in technical terms) to be a follower rather than a leader when it comes to Python.
And that’s without going into all the outside-of-g3 code (of which there is a metric ton, especially if you worked with any teams that deal with hardware or third-party/acquisition stuff).
A lot of people don't realize that the issues that python haters (myself included) have aren't generally about the look and feel of the language, but about how many sharp edges the language has for maintenance and scaling. Python 4 could fix all of these things if they ever did it.
Personal example - the fleet of hardware prototypes (that I used to work on) used for hardware-in-the-loop testing (basically the hardware version of CI/CD) was pretty much reliant on python. Anything that was compact enough to be accomplished by a script and generic enough (open this serial connection, write to that memory address, etc.), the de-facto default choice was almost always python.
But I fully agree with you otherwise, in a sense that I haven’t seen much of a gigantic python codebase consisting of a bunch of interconnected python modules, like you would see with other popular languages at Google (e.g., C++/Java/JS).
Google is also going all in on ML (or AI if you prefer).
These days if you are doing serious work, you simply use Java. Especially if you want something running for years. Java is really the only option you have.
A decade back I interviewed at a major telecommunications firm. Python was the new fashion then, they were trying to rewrite a fairly big Java code base to Python. Anyway I didn't get the job. My friend did. After a few years of this they realised, Python was not a serious alternative for an application of that nature. And abandoned it midway.
I know several other banks that have had a similar arc. Python is an amazing glue language and perfect for lots of automation and adhoc glue work. Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++.
Other languages like golang have come up in the past. While they are really good for smaller applications. They are just not there for something serious. 'Simplicity' has different meanings in different contexts. Either way, I think both Python and Java are here to stay and will be used for tasks where they are good at.
But we are now past the 'Python for everything' days.
It's a language that attracts casuals, but that does not mean it's incapable of being used for serious software engineering. The only scenarios where I wouldn't use python for a "serious backend thing" are scenarios in which there are dramatic cost/performance/etc consequences resulting from the overhead of using python which would be substantially reduced if using $lowLevelLanguage. Even then, there's always the option of outsourcing specific units of functionality to say, c++, anywhere the performance difference actually matters.
I would say that for the vast majority of use cases, acceptable performance could be easily achieved by simply writing better python.
Writing this reply brought to mind some absolutely atrociously inefficient ORM code I encountered in a python codebase recently. If you don't have an understanding of how to utilize SQL efficiently, it doesn't matter what language you're using to construct the SQL queries, the software engineering equivalent of warcrimes is possible in any language.
Python is an absolutely lovely language. It is not the 'perl of it's day'. In my experience, things get hairy when you start building bigger systems that require a lot of collaboration but you can probably do away with most of the pitfalls if you use type hints. Beyond that, it's main downside is performance but you would be shocked how little code you have to convert to C/C++ to remove bottlenecks.
You are right that most large orgs choose a language like java, but I'd also argue that C# and golang are good fits as well. They're fast, and they have a garbage collector. I suppose typescript / node could be in that same category but I steer away from that stack as a backend dev.
Whatever it's coded in, the back-end of reddit is pretty robust and well-done (maybe excluding the video hosting part and whatever new laggy crap they put in)
It's the new front-end of reddit that's a huge dumpster-fire.
The what, now?
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 lower cost regions. For instance, two teams get combined and the higher cost manager is laid off. Or a whole team is laid off, but those duties are being restaffed by people in a lower wage office.
There was a townhall for the past wave of layoffs where the exec in charge preferred to take the meeting via video call from a huddle in the same building as the auditorium where the townhall was taking place. Just to not be seen with the employees.
Seattle is actually in the tier below SF and NYC, which makes its pay around 10% less. However, it's mostly a wash when you consider that Seattle doesn't have state income tax, so your net is roughly the same in both places.
Tariffs for hiring non citizens.
Force companies to follow all the same employment laws for employees and contractors in other countries.
The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?
Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but not so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.
In my experience, US workers, even with much higher wages, are simply better than Indian workers being paid much lower wages. Note that Indians being paid US wages, in the US, are fine - you just can't expect much if you're paying peanuts.
I have had experiences where entire offshore teams have contributed significant negative value. This false economy is as false as they come.
I think a bigger danger to US wages is European offshoring.
Either way, I think this gets away from the premise and starts getting into reasons not to do it (theoretically, you're losing some new jobs that would otherwise be created) more than reasons it's impossible
Historically protectionism was a major part of how the US developed its economy but typically countries become less protectionist once they have highly developed economies (because free trade tends to benefit them more).
Being the same Western culture helps a lot versus other areas favoured for offshoring.
[Source] Random link from the Internet so that I don't need to translate: https://www.emplawyers-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/files/...
Generally, workers rights here in Germany are quite good so as an employee life tends to be quite comfortable since you don't have to fear termination the moment the company isn't doing exceptionally well.
If you can't prove that you need to cut the person for "operational" reasons (e.g. because you're not really getting rid of python tooling engineers), then your best bet is to dangle large cash offers to people in order to entice them to quit.
If they do manage to prove they need to do layoffs, for example when the company is literally running out of money, then they're not allowed to just lay off employees as they like (and definitely not in relation to performance). Instead they have to follow the "Sozialauswahl" which means that factors like whether the employee is supporting a family, is older, etc need to be taken into account.
Then on top of all that, they won't be able to hire people even for completely unrelated roles, for some amount of time afterwards.
So all in all there's a few disincentives for layoffs to be considered as a first action (it's not stopped it from happening at a bunch of companies lately though, Bosch, SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments, Personio, Pitch etc).
(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 offshoring higher-value work)
Who knows maybe in 30 years Americans ultimately have a higher quality of life just due to our stronger economic position making it easier to sustainably fund M4A or whatever.
I'm much happier here because of the reasons you mentioned. I feel like my friends in America have are basically amassing wealth to insulate their liberal bubble in a conservative land. However, they might not be able to outweath the recent success of right wing policies that the American supreme Court has managed to impose.
For me personally, even the "low" tech salaries in Europe (think something like 150k an year total) is more than enough for the lifestyle I desire. If amassing wealth isn't your primary motivator, it absolutely makes sense to move to a society which better aligns with your values. That would probably be the EU for someone like you and me, but UK is EU lite.
I love that everybody here has the same access to healthcare and the fact that my high taxes help that. I like that the population responds to the actions of the elected officials - like how the current UK govt is doing absolutely terribly in current polls. In the US, it seems like it's always a tight race regardless of what the government does. I love being able to use public Transit to get to most places. I'd rather my potential kids grow up in a kinder society, where their wellbeing wouldn't be at risk if something were to happen to me or my job.
In my personal experience, there is also less stratification and less overt racism or bigotry. However, they're pioneering new and clever bigotry against trans people now and that concerns me.
Sure, and the Conservative Party, who has enjoyed a very long period of uninterrupted rule, has been gradually sabotaging it with the obvious hope that is falls apart and market reforms can be implemented. Most of these differences have more to do with the legacy of the post-War period than anything about the current political situation.
The UK is also significantly whiter than the US is, which is something of a counterpoint to the idea that they're less bigoted, in my view.
In the US, the time from Green card to citizenship is unbounded. people from India and China are pretty much never going to become citizens till they exploit some loophole like having an American baby.
Iirc you can indefinitely keep getting renewals on your h1b while waiting on the green card queue - and this queue is many decades long for people from certain countries like India and China.
I suppose healthcare is a major issue for me due to my disability. When I had to get insurance on the private market prior to the ACA I had to go in the high risk pool, which was stupidly expensive even as a SWE. I hear it's better now but every year some Republican gets the bright idea to try to repeal it. I fear with enough of a majority they will.
I immigrated from the US to another country a while back, and it's not unusual for me to meet newcomers with unrealistic expectations about life in their new home. Often, they go back to their birth-country after a few years, disappointed with the mundane reality of living in a foreign country.
I'm not trying to say that your wrong, necessarily. For some people, life can be better in other countries, but I caution against unrealistic expectations.
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. Europe immigrates tech workers by a truckload.
To reflect on the original issue. I'd guess that some manager either hated some other manager, or was looking for a promotion or was just dumb and executed some instruction in the stupidest way possible... there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason to move a team like that. Even if the team was entirely rehired in the poorest place on Earth, we are still talking about ten people. Whatever difference Google makes from the move is not even peanuts. If there's a manager being rewarded for this stupid idea, their bonus will probably be more than whatever savings this move can possibly generate.
I don't believe there's any actual rational justification for this move. Just middle management being middle management.
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.
Even 100k is considered a lot.
extremely wrong. what are you basing your assumption on?
the cost of a Munich employee is less than half of the cost of a California one, when you take into account salary, stock, office costs, whinging, etc.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. When I was there python was a pretty big part of the google internal ecosystem. Each major language there had a team supporting it. Not sure why you would be gutting those teams.
That said, I find that most sensitive managerial decisions aren't fully explained right away, if ever. I don't expect someone in this position, especially upset by the change, to know the full story. There's possible extenuating circumstances, such as team performance (even the manager was RIF'd).
When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India. They had another tranche of layoffs that were “delayed exit” to train those Indian employees.
... have already left the country.
It's a joke, but not really.
You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.
1. The forces that dictate the lowest price.
2. The forces that dictate the highest price.
These are completely orthogonal to each other.
Lowest price is based on cost of living, you can hire the cheapest person as long as you pay them enough for them to keep on eating. That's it. Notably this lower-end is going to have a lot of variance based on location.
Highest price is based on how much value a worker creates for a business, the highest price that you can pay that worker is somewhere that leaves the business with a margin profit. Of course it is in the businesses best interest to increase the margin for themselves, but as talent becomes harder to find, fat margins become less of a necessity and more of a nice-to-have. The job needs to get done or their golden-egg machine will die.
So!
You go to the lowest price at a another country, that's what you get in quality. Execs think that people are replaceable so they believe that the average X is the same here as it is anywhere else, the only difference to them is cost.
So yeah. You are not racist for pointing out that quality suffers due to cost cutting through offshoring. The lower cost-of-living countries (such as India) still have top tier talent, but that talent is priced similarly across the world, they are smart and they price themselves according to the value they bring.
Of course your assessment of those who can literally steal your job from under you is fair and unbiased
But remember, everyone has to be 'in office' for collaboration! /s
As Brian Cantrill said, Don't Anthropomorphize Google!
That is what Google has become under Sundar Pichai.
Strong words from a FAANG employee. Does he think there's another economic system which would give him the same extraordinary compensation package?
> as do I, in .nl
The quote you mentioned was a sarcastic comment on the US-specific layoffs, presumably.
everyone who works in FAANG, if you are drawing an enormous salary and bonus, compared to the average guy, i hope you realize the how fortunate you are. i hope you are putting away, saving, investing, at least 1/3 or 1/2 of it. when and if this happens after a few years, unlike the average guy, you can simply choose to retire or take some time off and travel rather than the normal option of loosing your home and being completely ruined.
Isn't that what so many people do in their own country in order to come to the US on a work visa to begin with?
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 multiples of 6 figure incomes start forgetting how lucky they are and how much they personally benefited from that exact system. a laid off googler's worst day is many, many times better than the average guys daily life. in this country, let alone somewhere else.
"Oh you should be happy you had a good thing going" is not something I'd find especially comforting if I was told I needed to rapidly uproot my entire life and leave a country I've spent decades in.
If you're physically within the U.S. (just a location, not a citizenship/green card restriction) feel free to reach out, contact info is in my profile.
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.
There are lots of countries in the world that welcome gay people and have simpler, saner, and more predictable pathways to permanent residency than the USA.
This person moved to the US for undergrad, attended grad school, and has been working in the US for like a decade. That's 20 years here. Even if they were only here on H1b for two years, simply moving somewhere else would still be leaving the country they lived in for 12 years. You can surely understand why somebody would be motivated not to do this.
However, Google employees only capture a fraction of Google's profits. Google made twenty five billion dollars in profit in Q1. Annualized that is 100b. Google has 180,000 employees. That is 555,555 in profit per employee. If Google was really existing in service of its employees rather than its investors, as it would be in a socialist system, then I'd expect my pay to rise dramatically.
But then it wouldn't make that kind of profit.
What socialist system is that where a company is run from the benefit of its employees?
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 workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.
I was considering, but after seeing how they operate, I am certain I will be ok without doing so. I am yet to see them accomplish anything meaningful, and behavior of some of their members tripped my “this seems unethical” meter really bad.
I might’ve mentioned that story on HN before, but the rundown of it was that one of my friends was interviewing at Google. He called me the day after one of his interviews, saying that he had a really weird experience, and he wasn’t sure what to think of it.
TLDR: his interviewer was a member of AWU and spent every single second of the interview (that wasn’t spent on working on the coding problem) on trying to sell AWU to my friend (as a candidate/interviewee). All that time that would normally be reserved for the candidate to talk about their experience/projects, ask questions, etc., it was all taken up by the interviewer shilling AWU. My friend was shocked enough by this to warrant calling me, which he never did before with any work-related things.
Had a neutral-positive opinion on AWU until then, and had a neutral-negative opinion since then. And it has only been very slowly going down as the time passes.
P.S. The following part is definitely biased on my end, but the vibe I got from a bunch of interactions with a number of AWU members over the years was the same vibe I get from reddit slacktivists coming from certain subreddits (antiwork and atheism ones specifically). And while I have nothing against the stated goals/purposes of those subreddits, I have plenty against the actual reality of the behaviors of their members. I don’t care about it much, because a lot of them are actual teenagers. But it isn’t good optics for an actual workplace union, when your union members behave like they forgot they aren’t on reddit anymore.
They very much give me the vibe of the "late stage capitalism" 23 year old reddit type. I remember one post from a guy complaining about how the company abuses its employees because in the EU everyone gets so much more vacation. I guess he didn't compare his US salary to EU salaries. Checked profile, tenure: been at company 6 months, and already complaining.
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 their disappointments into organizing.
Those disappointments were created by Google: they (used to) market themselves as a benevolent employer. People get on board, and realize that the truth is far from that. Of course, they wouldn't be able to hire some people they wanted to if they had told them the truth. Should those employees know better? Maybe. But any relationship, including labor, is built on trust.
"I hear you because we care about you, your concerns are noted, but please stop thinking for yourself and stay in your lane, because we are a family"
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.
Rule is simple cheap labour and more people can do better job.
Globalism at its worst.
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 it saves the eng cost the most.
Dropbox has historically done a lot for python, idk how current that is. Netflix has a huge python codebase but I'm not sure what they contribute.
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 these help all of LLVM's clients.) But if this team is able to make a search query faster by even 0.01% a year, at Google scale that saves literally millions of hours in compute across Google's fleet. And millions of hours of compute is millions of dollars in power, space, and need to expand.
This is true of all the other language teams at Google too.
The Python team builds a better python by fixing upstream bugs, reducing the memory it consumes and so on. It upgrades the internal installation of Python to the newest versions, ensuring that the upgrade is smooth and doesn' break the using teams.
It contributes proposals for language features to upstream, ensuring that Google's use cases are at least considered.
* 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 keep thousands of third party packages constantly updated from their open source versions, with patch queues for the ones that needed google-specific changes
* had highly customised versions of tools like pylint and black, targeted to google's style guide and overall codebase
* contributed to pybind11, and maintained tools for c++ integration
* developed and maintained build system rules for python, including a large effort to move python rules to pure starlark code rather than having them entangled in the blaze/bazel core engine
* developed and maintained a typechecker (pytype) that would do inference on code without type annotations, and work over very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
* performed automated refactorings across hundreds of millions of lines of code
and that was just the dev portion of our jobs. we also acted as a help desk of sorts for python users at google, helping troubleshoot tricky issues, and point newcomers in the right direction. plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams, the colaboratory and IDE teams, teams like protobuf that integrated with and generated python bindings, teams like google cloud who wanted to offer python runtimes to their customers, teams like youtube who had an unusually large system built in python and needed to do extraordinary things to keep it performant and maintainable.
and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the "marathon, not sprint" approach to work. as i said in another comment, it's the best job i've ever had, and i'll miss it deeply.
we did also have a separate tool that could merge the inferred types back into the source code as annotations, but it never got much uptake.
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 in.
this was a very real issue for things like the python runtime or widely used code checkers like pytype or pylint, because if e.g. the new version of python, or some improved check in pytype, started raising failures in a code pattern that was technically wrong but which the existing toolchain did not complain about, you could not release the new version until you had fixed all those new breakages.
contrast this with non-monorepo codebases, where the other code would have had to deal with the fact that "oh, our code works under 3.10 but 3.11 broke it, guess we have to pin our own repo to 3.10 until we fix it", but as the python team we could just say "we support 3.11 now, you need to catch up"
Google engineers hate this one weird hack: just send a mail saying "we're deleting/deprecating [everything your product depends on] in [14-180] days, good luck!"
At Microsoft, if there were 12 teams depending on service foo, the team who owned foo had to have a deprecation plan that included sufficient time and support for all 12 teams to get off foo, and directors/VPs would meet and come to terms before the deprecation started.
Google is the opposite. Despite an increasing trend towards top-down direction there's no requirement or support for involving stakeholders. There can be internal products (let's say a data storage solution) and the team who owns it can say "we don't care about this anymore, it's being shut down in 6 months" even if dozens of other teams and millions of end users rely on it, and it's up to those teams to scramble, put other projects on hold, and try to migrate as fast as possible to avoid an outage.
It's frankly demotivating. For the last 18 months, a huge percentage of eng time on my team has gone to either compliance or mandatory migration work i.e. stuff that ABSOLUTE BEST CASE customers don't notice.
> very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
Just wait a few years. When they come calling for consulting services, charge them triple.
I feel for ya, zem; if you ever turn up at a PyCon in person, lemme buy you a drink.
Several of us were/are/TBD also involved in both long term strategic leadership and maintenance of the open source CPython project itself. That direct feedback line from a major diverse needs user into the project and ecosystem was valuable for the world.
The reason I stayed on this team for 12+ years is as zem said. It was an ideal impactful alignment of people, abilities, priorities, and work life balance. My prior teams at Google... were often not.
For the first half of our Python teams existence, there were only ~5 of us. Many early years were spent paying down internal tech debt accumulated from prior years of neglecting to have a strong Python strategy and letting too many do their own thing. Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team.
Signed, -- the now-ex runtimes TL
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.
Here is the job description: https://www.getcruise.com/careers/jobs/2831153/
If any of you are interested, feel free to directly reach out to the recruiter Connor Anderson (Connor.Anderson@getcruise.com) or feel free to apply directly.
Hi Zem could you say more about how you maintained those thousands of third party packages? We are facing the same issue and would love to hear your insight!
* copybara [https://github.com/google/copybara] to mirror between github and our internal repo and transform the source tree layout to our internal conventions
* mercurial patch queues [https://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/managing-change-with-mercur...] to apply internal changes
there are internal tools to automate the copybara configuration for python packages specifically, and to map between mercurial and google's version control system, but that's the main idea, and a specific review process for adding new packages.
the process is actually documented here though not all the referenced tools are available (or even applicable) externally: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...
This is very interesting. Can you share more about this?
one of the current "extremely large python codebase" projects is instagram, and they do have some public repos, notably monkeytype (https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType) which youtube did have its own analogue of, and cinder (https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/02/open-source/cinder-jit...). in general facebook's engineering blog is a great place to read about this sort of thing.
What is the 'Python' team?
Open source python language package maintainers?
JAX (and Keras) is where the push is now. And, grudgingly, PyTorch
I agree that just shouting "capitalism" is really poor commentary though, now everything that involves money is called "capitalism" for some reason, even though every single place that organizes around money has this basic incentive of cheaper labor. "Capitalism" or "not so capitalism". :shrug:
O RLY?! That fact totally changes my whole argument... unless it was an example of a non-capitalist society and I never claimed it currently exists and the point was the comparison of living in capitalist and non-capitalist system.
> the existence of people being highly paid does not disprove the fact tha the us-style capitalism is a terrible system for anyone but the highest echelons
The guy complaining about it is the highest echelons. He was working for frickign Google, which pays tons of money. Not that this duckspeak isn't a complete lie for pretty much all people. As a person who, unlike you, actually lived in the USSR, I can tell you that it had humongous inequality and a myriad of daily degrading and humiliating problems for almost everybody "but the highest echelons", on the level that somebody living in a Western country can't even imagine. Capitalism may have its flaws, in the US and everywhere, but man you don't know how lucky you are, compared to the alternative. And I don't wish on anybody to ever learn it. Just stay ignorant and take your knowledge from your weed-smoking cool pol-sci prof who surely knows everything about the matter. Really, this way it's much, much better.
however, i do not mistake capitalism with free markets; capitalism (in the stage where we are, ruled by rentiers and oligarchs that we call billionaires) needs to be reined in if we want to fucking survive.
It's not that their criticism isn't valid, it's the feeling that they are perpetuating and benefiting from capitalism more than 99% of people, so they are all talk and no walk.
1 - I think the move to Germany is a tentative one - they could not pack all and move it to India thoroughly like IBM did, because in a election year this can create waves in the public opinion and shift votes against MAANG/FAANG corporations sponsored globalist politicians.
2 - It's only but the beginning. German and European staff have a better STEM formation in real universities (for now) but when Alphabet will have to face work unions in Germany they will pack again and go India, Burundi or whatever else.
3 - I see that some of the most relevant FOSS projects core programmers are getting the axe in this move. I would like to elaborate on this since open source now fosters autopilot, gemini, that are perceived by the big companies as a way to lay off or to pay peanuts the real software developers that created and fostered the FOSS movement.
4 - The people left in the cold were not saved by their putting the pronouns in their bio, nor by abiding to cambodian-style woke ideologies. They licked but when they were not needed anymore they were dumped, with their mouth full of it.
5 - Flutter is DEAD. No matter how you put it.
6 - Since the Agile mindset and antipatterns were adopted, it seems that large companies are self-eating thinking they can do keeping management only. Meetings and fake presentations of systems that deliver 5% of what stated. Anything productive is seen as debris of demon. Pol-Pot style, if you have any competence you are an enemy of the people and of the DEI mantra.
7 - People with experience in this and willing to react to this trend are scared to talk and isolated. Not being able to express dissent while seeing the whole productive sector of the western world being dismembered, vilified, destroyed.
8 - Large companies are like Zelensky, they need stupid cannon fodder that follows the orders and if not can be replaced in zero time with even more submitted servants. If you are OK with this I feel no empathy towards you and your peers. These people saw google implement sjw ideologies in any products, staid silent, and now they are not useful anymore to the system they so eagerly and willingly contributed to enthrone.
Python inside Google, for non-AI stuff at least, feels quite a bit different than with different defaults than the rest of the world. This may have the side effect of eventually aligning with the broader outside Python community.
That's how all jobs should be though. The only time anyone should be sprinting is if the building is on fire. I guess Google is moving to a 9-9-6 schedule, and they want to do it in Munich where they can pay peanuts for it.
Google used to be about working smartly and not grinding just for grind's sake, which is totally respectable. At some point, however, that became Google's external brand as well, and went in the head of the people being recruited. The result is, recently, people self-select and optimize for joining Google precisely for "work-life balance." i.e. if you want to actually work and get paid for performance, you are better off joining Facebook. Google ends up with the rest of the folks who join with the expectation of low expectations.
If you prioritize busyness you will get busyness but not necessarily productivity.
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