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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

i got caught up in this :( really sad about the whole thing; this was by far the best job i've had in my 20-year career (including other teams at google), and i do not know if i will ever have another one as good. we were a chronically understaffed team supporting a large part of the python ecosystem at google, and we did some amazing work over the years.

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Seriously, what is the reason for this move?

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.

they are building a new python team from scratch in munich, for whatever reason. yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.

I am sure you will find another job that you really like. Well you said you guys were seriously understaffed but that makes it more nonsense to fire them. So were you guys working on a specific project and will those guys from munich continue on it.

we were working on a ton of stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) - pretty sure the munich team will need to pick up most or all of it.

Salary, right? I have to imagine at one point the gap between US devs and European devs is starting to be felt

The team wasn't US based - GP is in .nl...

As others have pointed out, OP is in NL, but the rest of the team was in the US.

I’m sorry to hear that.

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?

i doubt there is much room for a priority change. as i said elsewhere, we were a pretty understaffed team, so we were already very focused on the highest value internal use cases. we did have a couple of people who also worked on the core python interpreter, but that was only a fraction of their duties, and even our open source and upstream contributions were driven by stuff that google also needed done.

The Python Foundation team should spin off and make an AI company. Would probably receive a lot of interest from investors.

In my mind it would make sense if there are some laws to which they want to adhere, perhaps something EU-related (GDPR? IDK), and moving to Munich might be a good way of prioritizing. Perhaps something US-related they don't like, see for example that TikTok is an AI company and yeah, or the KYC-related stuff [1]. However, I am talking out of my ass, I don't really keep up with laws, upcoming bills or anything like that. :shrug:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158752

@zem maybe you would be interested in what we do http://tektonic.ai please let me know at nic.surpatanu@tektonic.ai We are looking for an ML + DSL engineer to imagine and build our execution runtime and dev platform.

Care to weigh in about what you reckon happened? Surely the company didn't suddenly lose its need of the Python ecosystem?

i reckon we simply got offshored, since they're now building a whole new python team in munich, though i don't know whether for cost reasons or to expand the languages presence in the munich office or both.

Why would they lay off the existing team first, rather than spin up the new team, have the old team train the new team, and give old team members a chance to move countries if they wanted?

i honestly don't know, except perhaps to say "this is what google is now". your "rather than" is definitely how it used to be done in the past.

I can only speculate: some directors/vps got headcount reduction goals (reduce eng cost by XXX with deadline at XXX), and they couldn't meet those goals if the layoff is to be delayed until the new team is fully operational.

This. There was a sudden push to reduce costs and people with decision power tried to make sure their teams won't get affected.

Gateway to cheap developers in Eastern Europe, Poland, Ukraine, etc

aren't all european countries cheaper than the USA in terms of salary, including Germany?

They are, but Germany has pesky expensive things like unions, employee contracts, and benefits. Keep heading east and it gets an order of magnitude cheaper than Germany.

I would have expected countries like Poland to have a mature enough IT ecosystem that Google could have just moved there directly if they wanted. Why stop over at one of Europe's most expensive places to get talent if that was to goal?

because it's easier to get Polish, Czech, Ukranian engineers to move to Munich than Dutch, UK, German etc. to move to eastern europe I assume

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