Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart, Python teams before dev conference | Hacker News Reader

Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart, Python teams before dev conference

techcrunch.com

60 pointsCharlesW50 comments

Of course they do.

Never depend on anything commercial by Google except Ads. Even G-suite is pushing your lack.

>“We’re sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond,” wrote Google PM Kevin Moore in the Flutter development community on Reddit, where he added that Flutter and Dart weren’t affected any more or less than other teams. “We know ya’ll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we’ve built together. You’re nervous. I get it. We get it. You’re betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google,” he said.

Pro tip: if a company has to make a statement that they still care for some technology or product of theirs, they' dont.

To be fair, they are not necessarily reducing headcount, they are just going to move the jobs to other places like Munich, Bangalore, Mexico?

Of course, if they are willing to treat their employees like this, they are likely to treat their users worse.

Are they treating their employees poorly? According to one quote, "... it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’ll miss it deeply". That sounds pretty good; do you think Google should have to retain every employee they've ever hired, at sky-high wages?

I think laying off employees without offering to move them to where they are shipping the jobs to is an example of poor treatment. While the employees acted with the utmost professionalism in their social media posts, you can tell that they are hurt.

I get it, it is just business, but the reality is that the world of business is built upon goodwill.

> laying off employees without offering to move them to where they are shipping the jobs to is an example of poor treatment

I don’t think that offer would’ve made much sense, when the goal is to build a full low cost team elsewhere. Why would the high cost employee agree to such a transfer? Who would it benefit?

For one, a high cost employees savings could go a very long way in a low cost of living country.

Obviously, google sees something there — why wouldn’t the employee? If you have built your life around your trade, and the center of the trade moves, maybe you should consider moving. That may be easier than finding a new trade.

Still doesn’t really answer the question as to why an employee in a high HDI country would move to a lower one for reduced pay when they could remain in their existing one and get a different job? Not sure any amount of money could convince me to move to a place with potentially unreliable plumbing and sewage and away from my support networks where I am now, and that’s coming from someone who spends their time between two diametrically opposed cultures already.

The value Google sees in these places is lower cost labor. This is not valuable to the current employees and is not a reason to move there.

Bangalore is a very nice place. I have not had an issue with those things there, granted the level of inequality is very high. I also assume Munich does not have those problems either.

Moving away from support networks is one major challenge, however, there is a strong expat community there, not to mention people may have relatives in those places.

To the original point, if google just sees people as fungible cost centers,they will eventually dump their users, too. It will eventually be a Boeing, where employee / employee good will has been eroded, and no one takes pride in their work .

I see your second point as exactly where Google and many other hyper-scale companies are going. They seem to legitimately see all employees as spreadsheet rows to be shuffled around to achieve maximum efficiency.

Outsourcing in general comes and goes in waves, and Australia is also certainly on the upswing towards outsourcing at large corporations as well, but it will likely come back the other way once time cost and quality is considered, before a different MBA comes in a few years later and starts the whole process again.

> Why would the high cost employee agree to such a transfer? Who would it benefit?

I don't know Bangalore, but Munich (mentioned in the article) may be a cool place to live and the compensation may be in the same ballpark than in the US after taking into account cost of living. It's actually not uncommon to see people working in US offices transferring to Europe. And most employees in Europe don't necessarily want to transfer to the US even though they often could.

Reasons could be interest in a different culture, not adjusting to US culture, better work life balance, better job security.

If Google did this, it would 100% be framed as "Google offers demotions to dozens of employees" because salary is adjusted based on the cost of living in the area. So it's still bad press not to mention the employees have to uproot their lives to move if they were to accept (move countries, get legal permission to work there etc.).

It’s only bad press in the us. There’s not a way to have good press here from a U.S. perspective. Its positive news for the other countries.

>If Google did this, it would 100% be framed as "Google offers demotions to dozens of employees"

Which is what they did, even if they didn't offer it. They demoted those positions - and gave a clear signal they don't care for those projects.

Those employees helped make Google a $2T company. They just had a quarterly income of $24B. Firing people because of wages is wrong in this instance.

Flutter employees unlikely helped to make Google $2T company, since they do not participate directly or indirectly in main ecosystem/revenue streams.

Everyone at the company contributes. Some people are in roles where the kpis may be harder to measure or that just have more risk in general. However, it is that risk taking that helps the company grow.

I disagree with you. Some contribute, some make damage (for example bad engineers, managers, dysfunctional teams, dead products). Company is successful if impact from former is larger than from latter.

I agree with that point, some parts of a company can detract value or contribute negatively. For the teams affected recently, however, i think that would be hard to argue.

These people got paid for their work, and in many if not most cases were able to benefit from their part in Google’s growth over their tenure via stock options. Why is it wrong to part ways after the relationship stops being mutually beneficial?

To be clear, it appears to be mutually beneficial still. It is just not as optimal as google would like it to be.

>do you think Google should have to retain every employee they've ever hired

No, just those working in product lines Google cares about.

So if they didn't for these and just casually reduced those teams headcount or moved the jobs to cheaper places, they probably gave up on them. This is not a sign of Flutter, Dart, and so on getting bumped in commitment from Google, but the opposite.

Should there be reciprocity, where the employees are not allowed to leave while their project is still 'cared about', and they're still getting paid? I suspect your answer will be "no", and if so, I'd like to hear why the commitment only goes one way.

No one is saying google is not allowed to do something or vice versa.

Forcing long running members to leave a team (especially en masse )usually hurts the project long term, and the users that depend on their work should be nervous.

It is also does not inspire confidence that google is invested in their workforce or users.

I would argue a long running team member that leaves a company without gracefully handing off a task also did not follow a best practice. They are of course, free to leave in the United States.

"Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers." [0]

[0] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Flutter was my goto mobile framework for a good while.

It's like I can't win as a high level developer. Learn Unity, the company starts to implode.

Now Google is going to deprioritize Flutter. Is anything safe?

Do I have to start writing games and mobile apps in C++?

No, but I am starting to wonder if software innovation is being moved outside the U.S.

There's innovation happening outside the US for sure, but the US is and will continue to be the capitol. We're just witnessing the exact same economic short sightedness that caused overhiring followed by layoffs in 2022, 2023; now repeating as undersizing.

Now is a fantastic opportunity for startups.

The python team is moving abroad, not undersizing. At least, that was my reading of it. I would argue this is different than over hiring. Over time, in cheaper areas, the hiring may even expand.

In the US there seems to be a focus on the southern border and immigrants taking mostly low paying labor jobs. Is there a focus on foreign labor, outsourcing, taking high paying jobs?

Yes. Part of the white collar recession.

Let me retract the word undersizing a little bit. A lukewarm step before undersizing is lowering cost by lowering quality. That's what we're witnessing.

I assume removing long standing people on a project would greatly decrease quality. I am sure that google wont spin it that way. I wouldn’t go as far to say that cheaper labor always means less quality.

that it is crashing down in the US is a fact, but what is showing up elsewhere?

SwiftUI and Compose are honestly very safe bets, 1st party support with a similar declarative approach to UI.

Obvious downsides in complexity of Swift/iOS libraries and Kotlin/Android but when the alternative is mobile UI C++, well.

Skip.tools is an interesting solution for writing SwiftUI and generating a kotlin Compose project

React Native has been solid for years now.

Not my personal choice but it has been solid career wise.

Biggest open source projects are safe, so choose Godot and blender and you will never go back.

Godot is a worse version of Unity.

The first problem is it supports two scripting languages. This divides your tutorial resources, with most of them being in GDScript which is a domain language useless outside of Godot.

I still can't use C# in browser projects.

>Note: .NET support is provided as a dedicated engine executable. C# support is available for desktop and mobile platforms as of Godot 4.2. Web support should be added in the future, but until then, Godot 3 remains a supported option.

https://godotengine.org/features/#script

The second is a lack of a live editor.

Godot does have a lot going for it, but I don't think it's ready yet.

For me as well GDScript as the main language is a solid deterrent - some time ago I looked into fiddling around with Godot as a hobby but I'm perceiving learning special DSL with no real purpose/usage outside of Godot as a waste of time.

When I think back on my career Unity got me to learn first JavaScript and later C# when I wanted to use certain assets.

I’m hoping Bevy gets me into Rust. I’m also open to learning C++ for the right engine

Pro tip: Never use anything beyond what is in a platform SDK, even if there are cooler toys elsewhere.

Those in-the-box languages, IDE tools, and frameworks, are safe for the lifetime of the platform.

For mobile apps the safe bet is native development. Cross-platform frameworks come and go.

Google is an advertising company. Relying on them to do anything other than service that business seems risky at best given the abundant history of rug-pulling. Even then, at this point I'd be questioning the support for ads. Support can mean anything from customer support to not running the business into the ground with blunders.

Google is the new Yahoo and sliding into irrelevance. Layoffs like this cut the core engineering functions of a company. After a while it becomes harder and harder to innovate and create meaningful products. Offshore teams can never replicate or replace these functions. This is crazy and the executives are clueless. Bring back Larry and Sergey now before it’s too late!

Shoulda put Dart into the Chrome browser. Flutter was plan B, no plan C for Dart.

dart was their .net for fuchsia, which is not going to happen because they remembered all OS sucks because of NDA from manufacturers writing garbage drivers/firmware, which they cannot fix with a new OS.

I've enjoyed using flutter and deployed 4 apps using it in the last 2 years.

Goddammit.

Why are such core teams being let go?

Good thing my Udemy flutter course only cost $9.99.

Is this the death of FlutterFlow?

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