Google layoffs hit Flutter team | Hacker News Reader

Google layoffs hit Flutter team

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122 pointsbusymom089 comments

Good to see a $2T market cap company doesn't have enough revenue to retrain and reassign these employees. I'd hate to think what the shareholders would have to endure had they not done layoffs.

Many Google layoffs were just teams shutting down and employees had 2-3 months to team match.

Google hired way too much during pandemic. From what I hear from G friends, this is likely a low performer prune.

This has been the message for all these layoffs - thousands of people. How many low performers did Google hire? Where's the accountability at the leadership level for this failure?

Sure the leadership probably failed too, but don't the "performers" have any accountability?

if it's a percentage based cut then it's predetermined in a sense. leadership is just doing this as a blood sacrifice to the animal spirits of the market.

If only 1% of Google employees are low performers, that's thousands of people.

I'm not sure how much hiring they did during the pandemic but cirac 2019 they had under 60k non-TVCs.

They hired a lot and employ roughly twice as many people as they did in 2018.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

This is absolutely not a "low performer prune." This is cost-saving bullshit.

They're explicitly letting go of high ranking staff in high wage metros. The talent and the institutional knowledge of some of those people makes the decision flabbergasting.

If you click over to the Python thread, you'll see that the victims include a member of the Python Steering Council and the maintainers of PyType. These aren't low-performers; they're people who are an integral part of the Python community.

Integral part of python community != valuable to a corporation right? I don't see how things not related to job duties or generating profit for a company are points against "low performer" label

You don't see how having the people whose job it is to maintain a large company's Python infrastructure be literal members of the Python governing council is "valuable" or "related to job duties"?

From the pytype homepage:

> Thousands of projects at Google rely on pytype to keep their Python code well-typed and error-free.

> They're explicitly letting go of high ranking staff in high wage metros.

How do you know those people still weren't low performers?

Isn't this just like Microsoft, skimming the bottom X% off? They might be great software developers, but an organisation that always skims off the lowest X% percent in an attempt to only keep awesome and 10X developers.

Unions, now! Funny how the people that actually created that value are the ones that get laid off while someone else gets a yacht.

How much value has flutter created for Google?

or dart for that matter

https://news.dartlang.org/2016/10/google-adsense-angular-dar...

Doesn't flutter do it's own rendering in canvas meaning you can't easily scape the page for info? Seems like flutter is in direct competition with Google's main income source, search.

When I worked a union job the ones “creating value” didn’t stay.

Being laid off is terrible and I don't want to minimise the suffering it's causing for those involved.

However Google had 55,000 more employees in 2022 than it did in 2020, an increase of around 33%. It seems possible they actually didn't have enough for all these people to do.

The company could easily afford to have kept these people on. But if, as seems likely, these people are talented individuals with lots of potential,then keeping them in roles where there's no opportunity to be productive would have had downsides too. It still sucks to get made redundant though.

Any insider knowledge about how this will affect flutter?

Like will the 3+year old bug request to work with firefox be more likely now?

Or is this just entirely bad and I should not consider new project using flutter?

The Reddit thread is of a link to a Tweet...

> https://twitter.com/leighajarett/status/1783848728878522620?...

With no solid information other than a to say "Some amazing #Flutter folks were impacted by the latest round of layoffs.".

So that could be 3, 30 or 300 people. Who knows!

Not defending Google, but to worry that Flutter is dead in the water is premature.

But having said that... it's Google! Once bitten, and all that!

One should definitely not worry that Flutter is drag in the water. One should draw a conclusion based on past performance (being the best predictor of future behavior) that Flutter will at some unknowable point in the future be dead in the water.

Managing the risk of that impact to projects is of course each individual engineers business and responsibility.

People have to stop building on Google software/apis. You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative (obviously Android isn’t included in this).

Which is probably part of the reason Flutter is getting shuttered. The Google brand is too unreliable to capture developer mindshare now.

But Flutter was the way out of all the fragmented historical legacy Android APIs and offers a cross-platform development experience.

Flutter isn't getting shuttered though? AFAICT these are company-wide layoffs that are affecting the Flutter team.

That the current team has just been mown by the latest swing of the scythe, doesn't mean the product is being killed.

At least in some other cases, other teams are being spun up or being changed to take on these projects.

Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't disruptive or unfortunate.

Their leadership is literally sh*tting on anyone by shutting down service after service in the faces of whoever made the mistake of building something on those services. They already lost their credibility it goes beyond that now - at this rate, they will attract the attention of the regulators: A gigantic monopoly controlling vast swaths of the internet and playing with people's money, time, businesses, and livelihoods like they are their pet projects...

Unless you mean that these leaders are taking their pants off and depositing feces on people, they are not "literally shitting on" anyone. They are figuratively shitting on people.

Why-not-both.jpg

Literally has also meant figuratively for a while now.

You're wrong actually, go check a dictionary

> (obviously Android isn’t included in this).

Why? Android is a never ending grind to support due to api churn.

Because outside of deploying your app as a web application there aren’t a lot of other ways to get your app onto Android devices aside from… developing Android apps.

So make a PWA.

Let's not forget, AOSP is still maintained by different individuals aside from Google. Google is mainly interested in integrating it's own "GApps" ecosystem, which introduces ridiculous amount of telemetry and degrades the security of the phone

(I never participated in the AOSP project or read the commit logs, so this is just gathered from news)

My impression is that big features come directly from Google, although I do know that OEMs contribute things here and here, like Sony "donating" LDAC upstream.

> You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative

alternatives can also disappear.

Can websites disappear?

I've seen it happen

Well, Android development has noticably slowed down and got less attention. Look at Android 14 page. What are those "new features"? Not really worth talking about it you compare with previous versions. And Android 14 barely got mentioned in the previous Google IO.

Meanwhile there is so much that needs improvement in Android. To begin with, password Autofill. Compared to iOS, this is a nightmare.

Ehhh, I've barely managed to keep up with all the changes to Android. Things like permissions/security, Jetpack, Material 3. I'm happy to let them slow down for a bit.

> To begin with, password Autofill. Compared to iOS, this is a nightmare.

Really, my practical experience has been the other way around.

And this seems to be the general consensus. iOS autofill is terrible compared to Android's.

Android at this point is a mature OS we are only going to be seeing polishing at this point.

In my team I have a policy to not depend on Google, apart from obviously, Android.

Their KTLO on every product is absolute poo — will take an MS equivalent any day of the week.

I mean Microsoft Access is still around

Not surprised. Flutter similar to many Google iniatives have no to minimal revenue tie in. This applies as well to grpc, bazel, beam, dart, fuschia, golang, gerrit.

Personally I would not use any open source project that has less than 40% of the active contributions from non Google parties.

I think Go is unique in this list in that the only other language that fills the same niche is Java, and Google can't afford to let the licensing whims of Oracle decide its fate.

That said, I'm actively rooting for the demise of some of the others.

Kotlin is always an option and it also interpolates well with Java.

Kotlin is also at the whim of one company (JetBrains), unfortunately..

Wow losing support for Golang is a scary thought I hadn’t considered until now.

I'm waiting nervously in anticipation.. But I wouldn't be surprised tbh

Another option is C#, it keeps getting active development, is the closest[0] in performance to pure unmanaged tier of languages and has tooling similar to Rust's cargo, isn't being abandoned any time soon (it's a core dependency of msft and seems to be increasing in amounts of promotion (finally!)), and has other industry players also working on it (like Unity).

[0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Golang is popular enough that development would continue even without Google. Could be a fork with a different name if needed, but it's not going anywhere.

Too many companies are relying on it.

They are so entrenched on gerrit, it's so uniquely terrible. Should have bought Gitlab when there was the moment

Gerrit's model is pretty interesting

It doesn’t seem to me that Flutter was singled-out. Google is going through a phase of company-wide cuts (for example, a lot of people in their Python team have just been made redundant, as well). It also looks like there is a substantial amount of development (still) taking place in and around Flutter… think Impeller and WASM-support (to name but a few). On the whole, Flutter’s ecosystem seems to be, at least, reasonably healthy. All of this does not mean that Google won’t kill Flutter at some point. I just don’t think it will be now.

Even if google kills flutter, I think the project has reached the point where it can live on without them. The framework and ecosystem has been around for years by now and in the time its been around, its been maintained by some seriously smart people. It can live on with a smaller team, new features will just take a little longer.

Obviously its still sad when people get layed off though.

Google GWT and ecosystem is dead even though it was greatly popular - today nobody consider it to make a new app with that. Same with Facebook Parse - once Meta stopped supporting it most people don't use it even though it was open sourced and seems community still work on it - instead people use Firebase or Supabase.

Flutter is more complex and more ambitious than GWT or Parse - it has currently 12k+ open issues, imagine how many developers you need to resolve all of those. Without Google support Flutter would be practically dead - no company would consider it for any serious new project and instead would go with React Native, PWA, unity, jetbrain compose multiplatform

I tried GWT years ago and it seemed clunky. It reminded me of Swing and SavaJe. Learning Flutter now, which seems vastly better. as you point out "more complex and more ambitious" but also seems much more ready for creating end-user-facing software.

Link should be the referenced/deep linked comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_la...

Now I'm even more concerned for the future of Flutter.

Here's the truth: Google's services are like sand, and you shouldn't build your house (your business) on top of sand.

From the link it doesn't sound like Flutter was singled out specifically, but more of a cut & slash across several teams.

Doesn't make it any better though.

Serendipitous that just a few days back, I received an email stating that my unused Google Playstore Developer account was going to be shut down. I had only made and taken off one app some years back, and that was built with Flutter, the only mobile app framework that I know.

Thankfully I don't make a career out of Flutter, unlike some really talented exceptional folks like Remi Rousselet and Marcin Szalek. Imo, Flutter was such an awesome refresh in mobile, but lost their way when they messed around with Web dev, which was entrenched React territory, with a very shoddy experience.

After this announcement, I'll be 100% going with React for my side projects.

How's that Flutter's fault? Google shutting down the PlayStore account isn't really related to it at all.

And, I'm pretty sure nobody uses Flutter to write blogposts. It's usually used in highly rich/interective sites aka webapps like Rive, Google Earth etc. And it's technology and there is no boundary where innovation stops. It's not like React is the ultimate JS framework. Also, it's kind of Flutter's nature to adapt new platforms. So, I wouldn't say they lost their way. Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it.

So, I'm honestly kind of confused with your opinion.

No, I'm not implying that it was the Google Playstore's fault. I just meant to say that Flutter was awesome when they were mobile focused, and that's the reason I started developing some apps. It's just coincidental that my account got shut down by Google for misuse, when Google shuts down the team building the app framework I used. No shade on Flutter at all (except flutter web, which is still kinda shit). I actually feel a bit sad that there will be no company left out there willing to pick up the slack.

> Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it.

Except it won't. You'll suffer from poor SEO, poor rendering, poor performance, everything bad about Flutter. And all unnecessarily.

This is a shame that they are losing their jobs. But I can not be surprised at all. Flutter (and Dart) really just never seemed to have a reason to exist, and have not caught any traction.

I personally think that the idea of Flutter has a potential in itself (see React Native), but bundling it with Dart makes it a non-starter.

I like Dart. I don't like the quantity of asynchrony I have to fight with to use it, but that's a "modern world" thing and there's little I can do about it. But picking up dart from a C++/Python/Objective-C/Javascript background was dead easy and even occasionally pleasant.

Dart was a good language and it applied what we learned about mobile app dev into a language suited for it. I always thought Java was a clumsy option for mobile dev. It seemed like a good move IMO. There are going to be people resistant to learning new things anyway, and those people would stick with RN (coming from JS/React) or native (coming from Java/native).

Android later took a lot of the learnings from Dart and applied it there. I wouldn't say Flutter was a waste, it was just deprecated because there was little advantage over native Android.

what about Kotlin?

I think dart was meant to be used as a JavaScript alternative. Google was working on chrome with dart VM even... But as far as I remember it got abandoned due to pushback from the 'community' due to 'not wanting fragmentation'. Obviously by people who didn't want things changed.

Web is the only place where we don't have an alternative and dart would be a great contender.

People don’t want alternatives because we lived through the IE and flash days. Having a fragmented ecosystem for web makes every project more expensive, difficult to hire for and hard to maintain.

This is a bad take. The concept of bringing one framework to every screen is a great idea. Whether or not the current Flutter framework is perfect is another story.

Repeated layoffs: how to tell your other employees that you hate them and want them to leave also.

These damn investors and MBB consultants put a bug in managements' ear that costs must be cut everywhere while mindlessly sabotaging core profit centers and essential infrastructure in myriad indirect ways.

No one is asking what I think is an obvious question...

How much of this is driven by AI? Not for investing employees into, but Rather because the are seeing fewer devs being able to do more with the help of AI.

I'm thinking that's part of it.

That’s not really a thing

Which GenAI product would enable that?

I recently compared the number of Jobs on Glassdoor in the beginning 2023 and 2024. Flutter had one of the largest declines among of all the tech.

All sorts of teams got affected by layoffs but it means nothing about Google's continued investments in those areas. You don't get articles every time the flutter team grows by a few engineers...

Related discussion on HN [0] with 1000+ comments when Hixie was let go from google.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573

Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

Python team too, per twitter.

reinventing native UI, good riddance

I remember when it started, trolls were telling me how my React Native stack is bad and how active flutter's github is, how it was trending with stars. I'm like bro, having way more issues than stars isn't something to be proud of. LOL

Are stars even relevant? How about we track downloads and production use cases. Takes zero effort to star.

They better not f*ck over dart/flutter!

I chose them to learn over all the various web frameworks for app development. I like dart. I was worried about Google pulling the plug, but took the risk based on dart/flutter being used internally.

Google: don't make the time I've invested a waste please.

Tbh, there's no strong evidence supporting the claim ("killing flutter"). Also, google kind of has it's "layoff season". So, it usually affects almost all the teams at their headquarters.

But, that doesn't mean killing Flutter. Flutter is actually backed by other companies as well. Not to mention Canonical the biggest one. Also, many Chinese companies uses it as well (biggest are Alibaba, Tencent etc). Google uses Flutter in big projects like The Google Earth, Play Console, GCP console, Ads for mobile etc.

Also, Open Source contributors exists. Even if Google abandons Flutter, it'll be around for long time. Because it solves the cross-platform problem like no other framework ever could. At least, not with this level Developer Experience and platform integration.

I might sound biased because I'm a Flutter dev. But, I'd say to trust the community. Same reason QT is still around and better than ever.

Also, in a few years AI will replace us so what even matters /s

I thought it was the Google's fluffer team, and that would really be a problem.

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