Everything Google's Python team were responsible for | Hacker News Reader

Everything Google's Python team were responsible for

simonwillison.net

57 pointskryster15 comments

I had noticed that Google's ML teams are doing a ton of Python, and at the same time the overall support for Python in prod was pretty low.

This has lead to some interesting situations over the last year. Especially as "move fast and break things" Google Labs style demos meet "everything deployed must comply with a thousand horizontal mandates relating to SLAs, logging, production best practices, etc".

An astonishing number of things used every day at Google are unfunded "community commons" projects. This sort of used to work in the past when the company and the employees had a different relationship.

As Google gradually changes that relationship to a more conventional one, they will see more and more conventional results.

We're just submitting HN comments to HN now?

It's actually a great comment, I appreciate it being pointed out.

Like best of on Reddit

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

Yeah my post doesn't add much here, you can skip it and jump straight to the comment I linked to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338

Via another site.

If this doesn't have you looking for the door, idk what you're looking for.

Betting the company on AI, all of the tools of which are written in checks notes Python, and they think laying off all their institutional knowledge is a good idea?

perfect loop achieved

Interesting move by Google. I wonder what the reasoning was behind the layoff.

My guess is that the company set a goal to reduce headcount by X%, every executive was told to find some teams to cut, this team was expensive because the engineers in it were long tenured and excellent - and it caught someone's eye as a result.

Also there will be no revenue items for this quarter that are obviously at risk by cutting them that the person making decisions could be held accountable for.

If every team using Python is 10% less productive as they need to wait longer when they need changes from these central tools... they'll just blame the new team members.

One can only assume they want less Python in the company.

they've wanted less python for at least fifteen years, but getting rid of the python team just makes the enormous mass of python code and python developers less useful, it doesn't magically convert it to C++.

@dang was this post taken down from the front page through admin action? Does this post break any rules?

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