This is standard recent Google. A year or so ago, they laid off GCP upper tier support to replace them with cheaper workers.
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.
I'm not convinced demoralization is undesired in all cases; certainly it seems like there was a lot of frustration about workers demanding more pay, remote work, stances on various social/political issues, and so on. Making people demoralized and afraid of losing their jobs is one possible answer to that.
Theoretically you have a point. On the other hand it’s so bad for recruiting. I view companies that do large layoffs the same way I view companies that do a lot of contract hiring. You clearly don’t care about employees and their wellbeing.
Google was so impactful in redefining work environment in the 2000s that people have now a very hard time getting over them being now just another old school big corporation. I remember in the early 2010s the aura Google had here on HN was crazy, I guess 10 years are still not enough to destroy that image.
To be fair, though, even if the culture isn't the same as ten years ago, the perks (and pay) generally are. For people who want to work in a technical role and who may be in traditional enterprise IT, looking up to big tech (including Google) is still pretty rational.
They haven't been able to hire talent in over a decade. The only "talent" that ever considers working there is kids fresh out of school.
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.
Maybe we can see this as a positive, if it gets bad enough, the people coming into tech from the bootcamps who just did it for the money might move onto other fields.
Eh, I guess I have a different mentality about this. There are people that just love what they do for their job. Sure they can go from job to job but they actually enjoy doing the work. I grew up during a time when the CS department at my college was loserville. No one wanted to be there except the people truly passionate about the field and the department did not get much respect from the rest of my (engineering) school because of these small enrollment numbers(relative to the other departments).
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.
Well for sure, but it also helps make sense of why you'd see tech executives clamoring for something to be done about inflation even as they were clearly benefiting from the inflationary environment in some sense.
Support team is one thing. Google's Python team was a small team, most of which were also on the Python steering council or Core Python developers. These people had decades of experience in Python. Their knowledge and community connections is irreplaceable.
I'd fathom to guess that it's not even worth Google's time to replace a ten people team. It's probably just a KPI sent from the top -"Replace a few people to earn your bonus this year". Constructing useless KPI, when you cannot come up with interesting ones.
Moving things to india sounds like a great idea, except the 13-15 hour difference in communication. it's all well and good until you're in Cupertino and taking an 11:30 pm call because they have 0 hours of overlap... guess you can force them to work US hours, but that goes to culture as well.
Are they trying to show that India's workplace is more compliant and they'll just do what corp types will tell them?
Racist much? I work out of Europe and manage teams both in India and Europe. My experience have pleasantly gotten better with Indian teams. If the quality is sub-par then perhaps you're not a good manager? perhaps failing upwards?
There are cultural factors you need to overcome, and it's with every international team. I am not going to simplify this, because it's a multi-faceted thing, but focusing on a single thing, for instance, propagation of bad news, India is an intensely competitive market and I need to make it abundantly clear I want to hear the bad news as soon as possible, and that I don't care about blame, as long as we learn from mistakes. From the US, I often get bad news sandwiched between good ones, so I need to redouble attention.
I am from Europe and I have worked with many Europeans, Americans and Asians. Quality of sub-contractor colleagues from India was, same as from anywhere else, directly proportional to what the company paid for them. Good pay = skilled and hard-working. Cheap labour = barely any skills and hardly working.
Nah. Its probably a case of 'you get what you pay for'. They pay for cheap teams, and those teams give them what they pay for. Good talent is expensive in all countries - even if it is relatively cheaper in India compared to SF. The MBAs don't even want to pay that much. They want dirt cheap.
India is just like every other country. Ive worked with very bad developers in India, unbearable, and I've worked with excellent developers that I would hire again in an instant.
I have similar experience but with Americans. They knew very superficially about the business and completely dependent on our Indian team to get them out of their troubles. Troubles caused by again not knowing and just trusting another team (donno where they were from) to handle their issues.
This isn't a one off case either.
So get off your high horse. Both countries have qualified and unqualified people in tech and other fields. Just calling yourself the greatest country in the world doesn't change the fact that all of US depends on immigration
I gotta agree with the parent comment about teams in india. No high horses required.
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.
US college grads cant get jobs at Google. Google uses a staffing agency called "Cognizant" that is based 100% in India. $15/hr Cognizant workers recently asked for minimum wage & benefits in CA & Google announced they will not pay workers minimum wage or benefits IN THE US.
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.
Nah. This isn't the reason. The reasons to quality drops are economical / just a result of how anyone runs the place.
Here are some reasons why quality drops with foreign / powerless workers:
* Job is an asset. More so in poorer countries where even a low-paid US job makes a huge difference in terms of earnings in local currency. This is also, to a lesser degree what happens to visa workers. Fear to speak up. Fear to say anything that contradicts boss' plan. Losing a job like this has much more severe repercussions to the employee than if they were locals who can simply move on to another job just like the one they were fired from.
* Comprehension. No matter how good employee's English is, it's still the second language. It will make communication difficult. Beside the language, it's also often that employees who live in poorer countries have never seen either the equipment they are writing for, nor the customers who are going to use their products because simply don't exist in their countries. We rely on such shared experiences when we communicate the goals or when omitting details we even don't explicitly think about, while to the foreigners this could be completely unknown and unexpected.
* Work ethics are different between cultures. Vertical relationships in work hierarchies can be very different in different countries, which can easily prevent vital information from reaching its target. The desirable properties of employees are evaluated differently. Also, different cultures will have different ways to slack, which may not be easily recognizable to the other side.
----
In other words: it's hard to reliably transfer ideas (s.a. requirements, acceptance criteria, compensation etc.) across cultures, and this leads to failures. It's not necessary to put the blame on just one part of the team: both teams fail to communicate, and to ensure quality... but this also means that either teams' complaints are very legitimate and relate to some objective reality. Although some may start jumping to conclusions that try to explain this through racial stereotypes... actually trying to interpret the real problems through the scope of racial stereotype is what's bad about said stereotype.
The parent comment is about Amazon employees in India.
Your point #1 contradicts itself when you say "if they were locals who can simply move on to another job" --> Indians working India are the "locals" who can move onto another job. And Indian tech industry is very well developed, its not difficult to find another job, certainly not for those working in MAANG companies.
Entirely disagree with point #2, people can learn a language if they use it long enough. And Indians are no strangers to speaking multiple languages. The bilingual population of India exceeds the total population of US.
Its also extremely ignorant (maybe even racist) to suggest that people in India have not seen the equipment or the customers. Frankly, this is the most abhorrent part of your comment for me. Like I said, ignorance, hatred, and racism seeps through in any conversation.
Also, if a company care so much about quality of work, they can ship the equipment to India. Or does shipping not exist there either? Lastly, speaking of Amazon, which equipment is this exactly? Or what customers?
I somewhat agree with your point #3, but for a company like Amazon the hiring process is pretty much standardized. Its leetcode, leadership principles and system design for the higher levels. How much variation in evaluation can there be for such a standardized process?
> Although some may start jumping to conclusions that try to explain this through racial stereotypes...
And it needs to be called out. Unfortunately, it has become all to acceptable to be racist against Indians online. Even in channels like hacker news.
> Your point #1 contradicts itself when you say "if they were locals who can simply move on to another job"
OK, I need to clarify: another equivalent job. If you are local in the US, then all local jobs are "somewhat" equivalent (of course they are different, but they are within the same range). But, if you work in India (or any similar country) for an international company, or for the local Indian company -- that's a world of difference.
I'm not from India, but I know this situation from Eastern Europe. India wouldn't be very different in this regard.
Disagree. India has a vibrant startup ecosystem that is growing everyday and has produced some good companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Meesho, Zoho, Postman etc and their pay is definitely "somewhat" equivalent for the India cost of living.
In addition to the Indian startups like the ones I mentioned above, India is also a favored outsourcing destination and, because of the population its a huge market for many companies. Most global tech companies have development offices in India and pay good enough salaries for the local market. I'd say that in terms of raw numbers US >> India, but in terms of mobility and options and pay that matches cost of living, they are pretty much the same, with US trying to reduce employee mobility via hostile visa programs.
I am not Eastern European, but I have not heard of many eastern european startups that made it to billions of users. Nor do I hear it as a favored outsourcing destination, not nearly as favored as India. So its not surprising that its hard to find equivalent jobs over there.
> While you can name half a dozen of them, there are thousands that are nothing like that.
lol Isn't that the story of startups anywhere on earth?
Anyway, I don't think you understood my point. All I am saying is that there are "somewhat equivalent" options for job seekers in India. And that the market in US and India is not that different and Indian market is certainly not like eastern european market.
> Well, if it's an Indian startup targeting an international market: it's an international company in the making.
Well technically one can get to a Billion users without ever having to think of the international market.
In this tech job environment the US google employee is willing to do as many 11:30 nights as needed to keep his high paying tech job, and management knows it
Management is dumb if they think that. You can't announce year long continuous layoffs, and expect people to work hard. What will the hard working employees get in return if they get laid off? Most US Google Employees are smart people, they should know that now is the time to prepare to get off that tech island, and quiet quitting is the way.
RTO has been instituted and there not much you can do to prepare for a whole career change when in the office…
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
Last I checked google was in hybrid mode. That is 3 days a week in office max. Also, Last I checked a week was 7 days. Lastly, its not whole career change. Switching from Google to Netflix as a software engineer is not a career change.
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.
You will get laid off whether you perform or not is the general rule right now. Thus I feel the best move for employees is to prioritize and prepare for what comes after lay offs.
There are quite a few defined benefit pension funds and 401k/IRAs that depend on the publicly listed businesses’s continuous long term price increases to meet people’s goals of being able to use their “assets” to buy the quality of life they want in retirement.
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.
Anecdotally, I've heard this is the case at more than one major tech firm, and will likely have caught on since many of the same companies already laid off many recruiters during "difficult decisions for the very harsh economic environment for hiring that we caused, are largely immune to, and are now using as cover to cut costs and increase stock prices via huge buybacks"
The thing with Netflix is that they have such few open roles and there are plenty of other liquid high comp companies that pay similar. It was all about the original stock growth that just stuck I guess
Google never rebranded. It's still Google. They just had all these unrelated moonshots like Verily and Waymo that didn't make sense to keep pretending were a part of Google.
Even better, why don’t we just get rid of the unwieldy acronyms altogether and simply refer to them as “major tech companies”? It’s clearer and avoids the constant reshuffling every time the market shifts.
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.
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.
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.
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:
@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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
Okay, let's debug this logic. Google is AI-focused, true, but they're not a one-trick pony. Python's great for Al, but it's not the ONLY language. And mass-firing your Python team seems...counterproductive. Segmentation fault indeed!
Well it mostly still is a one-trick pony: ads. It has kept trying to not be a one-trick pony for a decade. In the latest report, Cloud and Hardware did add up to around 25%, so they are getting closer.
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.
CUDA is not C, it is a polyglot stack for GPGPU, using C++ memory semantics, with C, C++ and Fortran compilers, and anything else able to target PTX bytecode, including Julia, .NET, Haskell, Python JIT, Java,...
Yes, production code is C++, but the way the models are built is Python code, colab, save via Orbax/TF SavedModel, etc and then serve in C++. All (most, to hedge it) development is done via Python.
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 :)
Hello! Can I ask you for some random career advice? I am mid-career, in a low-level mgmt position but want to return to being an IC. My team's tech stack is Python and Kotlin, but in my position I don't get to code. I code for fun at home but it gravitates towards Python (as it is highly relevant for doing Deep Learning work). My question is if I ever go into a backend role, what language best lets me get into a deep tech position at a MANG. With Python's limited use in production in MANGS, I don't see how I'll pass the Leetcode coding interviews. I used to do distributed systems a long time ago and really miss it (Did professional work in C,C++, Java, Go and Erlang/Elixir but it has been a while). I have a child now that takes up a lot of time, so I can't invest in getting good (again) in too many languages. I also have generally bad memory (remembering all the functions in std lib in Java or STL in C++ is just impossible anymore). I generally love coding but my algorithms are pretty rusty too. Advice on how to pick a darn tech stack? Thank you.
It's not language, it's experience, network, and having a differentiator that makes potential employers say, "Wow, we need to hire brutus1213 for our team because they have a really unique skill at <X>!" (X could be Kubernetes, deep learning, Erlang, whatever... the more uncommon, the better though.)
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.
I retired (after 18+ years at Google) last August, and as of that date A LOT of production code used languages different from C++ -- Go, Java, Kotlin, AND Python, plus a few more (Rust, Dart, and many others). In my successful, long career at Google I did use C++ (I had "readability" in C++), but rarely: only when "ridiculous scalability" was needed.
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.
Many parts of tensorflow required Python- at least when I worked there a few years ago, it was nearly impossible to compile XLA into a saved model and execute it from pure C++ code.
You seem to imply that Google won't have a Python team... Google replaced it with a cheaper (and quite likely worse) alternative. They are still going to do the same thing (at least they believe so). They aren't changing direction or anything like that.
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.
Yes, I admit that this was a little bit reductionistic. I was aiming it to be mostly a joke about the situation, didn't expect it to garner so much response
People are focusing on verbage and precision, but are missing the point.
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.
> 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]
Poorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein. Sometimes with additional overhead referred to as "targeting" which gives a worse outcome and user experience, regardless, over simpler implementations that serve to inform. Targeting forgets causality, typically.
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.
Sounds like you should start a trillion dollar ad business! Or if you're worried about ethics start a "niche" billion dollar ad business that only serves ethical ads!
Did you miss this?
> ... and you're asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it.
Why, exactly. Do you not have the ability to take information and draw conclusions on your own -- like a functionally mindless automaton lacking a frontal lobe?
> take information and draw conclusions on your own
That's exactly what I did do. I don't approve with your kindest choice of words, nonetheless you, being a lucky sperm, also have the right of free speech
What people / HN don't understand is does the work they do really a 10 person $5Million per year value to Google or can it be done by Two really smart Python Experts.
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.
That really doesn't jive with this description of how much they were doing. Let me guess, this mythical two person team could also build Twitter and Uber over a weekend?
They built a prototype (probably in Rails, lol). Thousands of people built Twitter, including many who have never written a line of code in their lives.
> 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.
I have heard that SRE teams can get away with this on the idea that SREs usually are not as good at software engineering as SWEs, so some bad engineering practices can fly.
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
On the scale of the company, Python is a very small language, and the very important stuff is 100% not in Python. However, 100,000 people work at Google, and probably over a million have it on their resume, so "small" at Google is "big" for a lot of people.
Google can definitely afford (in technical terms) to be a follower rather than a leader when it comes to Python.
Google has published that it is at about 2 billion LoC not including experiments and scratch use. I don't know if the 100 million lines of Python includes experiments. Also, if the number is old, there is a chance that the number of lines of Python has actually gone down over the years due to the (soft) mandate to stop using it.
Correction, outside of the ML groups and anything related to CI/infra. Especially if you remember that Starlark[0] is a dialect of 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).
Starlark is not Python. It feels like Python when you write it, but it's very different in a lot of ways that really matter.
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.
I agree with you on this, but just saying, there is plenty of actual python (not starlark) at Google, all over the most crucial places (which a lot of people who haven’t touched those don’t even realize exist).
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).
Mojo developers will not be different from Python developers, also Mojo is still very unstable. Chris Lattner said last May that he expected Mojo to be usable in 18 months, so within the next 7 - 8 months
Python is mostly the Perl of the current day. And it attracts tons of beginners, that also means nearly equivalent amount of bad code(Just like in the Perl days).
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.
Even as a lifelong java dev, this is a silly take.
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.
Do you realise how your comment sounds? No actual reason for any of the opinions, just "this happened" and words like "serious". What does serious means, is it type safe or something? Can you try again with substance?
That's what i'm saying. The frequency with which the site just loses the plot and fails to load, or fails to carry out some action or other, is orders of magnitude higher than anything else i use.
I rarely get server errors on Reddit despite its massive scale… It’s the client which is a tire-fire. People blame React but that doesn’t have anything to do with it either. It’s just utter shit.
Exactly! The third-party apps used to load everything seamlessly.
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.
Using Python for a serious backend thing at a telecom firm is a big no-no, and I say that as a guy who has been paid to write Python code for almost 20 years now.
Python's absolutely fine to use for a "serious backend thing" at a telecom firm.
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.
The post suggests their jobs were offshored. Is this a common practice versus just closing the roles? I feel like US legislators should do more to protect domestic jobs from domestic companies, or else they’ll face the same eventual collapse as in manufacturing.
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.
You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.
In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well.
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.
General formula that majority of big tech MAG7 companies apply when it comes to India is "3 times HC than Bay area". If you see pay data for these companies, that seems to be correct with salaries in Bangalore to be 1/3 of salaries in Bay area.
Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.
That's not bigoted or racist. There are two forces when it comes to pricing labor:
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.
very nice reply. Along these lines, one problem many founders face is when professional management (new investors, board members) focus mono-maniacally on repeatability, unit economics, and generally ultimate fungible staffing. One way this is achieved (sometimes even deliberately) is to buy the cheapest, most easily replaceable inputs and do anything necessary to make the new configuration work. Staffing is a key tactic come hell or high water. This can cause obvious cultural issues.
This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
(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)
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.
There are many layers to "being familiar with anglo culture"... being able to understand technical documentation to a degree won't cut it in many cases.
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.
You know, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to use this divide to actually move to the EU and get residency. Then again, with so many countries having to beef up military spending and facing economic headwinds you really have to question whether all the social / quality of life programs that make europe more livable than the US would be sustainable long term either.
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.
If you work a white-collar job the US standard of living is substantially higher. If you're a laborer the opposite is true but you also probably have a harder time getting in to Europe in the first place.
I really do wonder if our material standard of living really contributes to happiness though? I don't want more 'stuff' I want guaranteed access to healthcare. I want worker and consumer rights. I want a country that recognizes climate change is a real problem and is doing something about it. I want a more fair and representative government actually beholden to the will of the people. I don't need a McMansion, a luxury car, I want a better society. I feel like Europe, or at least the Nordics, have that, and if my parents were not here in the US, I think I'd happily move.
I'm not in a position to tell anyone what to value in life, but I don't personally feel that insecure about my access to healthcare or workplace conditions, and I also feel that a lot of Americans have an unrealistic idea of what life in other countries is like or how their political situation is. For instance, does Norway take climate change more seriously than the US? In some sense they may, but on the other hand they're the world's third-largest exporter of natural gas in the world, after Russia and Qatar. Europe has its own spate of nationalistic far-right politicians, anti-immigrant politics, austerity, and other social ills we don't much think about when using them as a counterpoint to ourselves. We're all participants in a global system, after all.
Norway is kinda caught between a fortunate rock and a hard place. Their gas reserves are absolutely crucial and strategic for security in Europe as a whole. You'll note the country itself went absolutely whole hog on electrifying transport and infrastructure (powered via hydro) so they could export their gas to the rest of europe. This really paid off when Russia cut off oil and natural gas as Europe would have been crippled otherwise.
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.
Everybody tough with their job-dependent healthcare until they are let go because a chronic illness is too debilitating for the demands of the job and they are left with nothing but monthly medical costs of a few tens of thousands of dollars.
Just curious, have you ever lived or spent a significant amount of time in Nordics (or anywhere in Europe)? Generally speaking, I find that people who haven't lived outside the their birth-country often romanticize life in other countries.
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.
I'm grew up in India and went to grad school in the US and worked there. Eventually, I transferred to the UK cause I didn't get through the US work visa lottery.
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.
Oh, and also, if I choose to permanently live in the UK, or EU, the path to citizenship is deterministic with a known timeline.
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.
Apologies, you are correct. I haven't considered emigrating to the US for years and forgot the specific details. Most of my recent knowledge just comes from my friends who live there.
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 don't feel like the UK is in an especially strong position to look down at the US for being too conservative or doing too little for its poorer citizens but I'm glad you've found a place that suits you regardless.
I agree that UK isn't as left wing as I'd like, but there is really a huge difference between what's considered right wing between the UK and the US. For instance, the NHS. Poor or unemployed people get the same access to healthcare as I do.
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.
> For instance, the NHS. Poor or unemployed people get the same access to healthcare as I do.
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.
See what you did there? You conclude that because UK is "whiter", it means they are not "less bigoted". That's weird and I hope you understand what your brain did there.
Military spending is a good point. If the middle class all moves to Germany, the US tax base will suffer, and probably Germany will have to raise taxes for their military to compensate. But that would take decades.
> It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
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.
It's extremely hard to lay off in Germany, so existing Google employees in Germany are, on the margin, nearly free, and so can be reassigned (with something else being done with their current project).
As in, they would have to prove, potentially in court, that the layoff was absolutely necessary to actually be about to do it, plus pay an undefined fair severance amount (that people mostly seem to accept as 0.5 * monthly salary * years of tenure at the company), on top of the on-average 3 month notice period, which most companies will give as garden leave in order to not reduce morale even further.
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).
I'm sure this comes with some drawbacks, perhaps more cautious hiring, but I like the sound of these regulations. Anything to give employees a ballast against wild swings in the share price. If layoffs had a more delayed effect on the business (and could be reversed in court) there would be less incentive for CEOs to pull that lever.
Aside from the mandatory negotiation with the employee co-determination (works council), the layoffs "must be determined according to the principles of social selection [...] (t)his is often perceived as a major obstacle [...] it would be disastrous to have to dismiss top performers simply because they are younger than other employees or have been recently hired."
You are on the spot, it's almost impossible to lay somebody off who is like 50 y/o and has kids + has been with the company for quite a while.
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.
You might be surprised - the absolute difference in salary between Munich and a trendy US tech hub is more than $100k. The difference between getting a decent dev in Poland vs Munich is $30-50k max.
I believe the replacements were already Google employees. Just not python-team employees. So it's sort of offshoring but not exactly.
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.
I get what you're saying about them already being Google employees, but this feels like a loophole and not a material difference. I could see this being exploited if there ever were offshoring rules. Just hire your offshores a month or two ahead of time.
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).
This isn't the greatest submission and lacks any semblance of context. The poster is in Netherlands apparently and the new team in Germany? I have no idea what to make of this.
Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
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.
> As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
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.
Interesting, didn’t know that. I remember older threads of people fawning his accomplishments, but nothing about him being a cheap b*stard when it came to his colleagues salaries. We should do more of this name and shaming in our industry, it’s one of the few levers we still have at our disposition.
The issue is that now they're hiding. Those who do the decision no longer send emails, no longer show up in townhalls (if they organized).
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.
Wages by geo is just “pay the lowest price you can for the requisite quality of product/service you need”, which is what effectively every person does day in and day out.
for many many yearsr it's been a SVP-level project to move people and teams out of the expensive US parts to cheaper regions - Munich was a particular target for some reason (maybe it was the cheapest medium eng office in that timezone). there used to be a lot more carrot, though.
Looks like the new roles in Munich, if I’m reading the thread right? Could be more than just offshoring? Why not do India or some other cheaper place instead of Munich which isn’t cheap and has relatively strong labor protections?
Just for this specific team. They are “defragging their global footprint” and moving roles to Mexico City, Bangalore, and Germany (probably to to go after gov contracts).
Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.
It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.
Or will they, I mean, are you really going to found your business in... where, Singapore?... if you live in the US and your whole network is there? Maybe not. And tariffs are certainly an approach that could work to advantage native companies or those that employ a large number of US developers.
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
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.
> How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?
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.
The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.
The USA has trouble targeting foreign businesses who do most of their business outside of the USA. Its like, they can't tell SAP they should be using Americans to address an account in Taiwan, WTF? Google has plenty of offices around the world, but it is pretty proportional to the amount of business it does around the world also! So telling Google they need to serve everyone around the planet with American workers while SAP gets to use whatever because it isn't American, Google would quickly become a German company instead of an American company. You can't have American companies playing by overly restrictive rules if you can't force the rest of the world to play by those same rules, and America's influence to do that...unless it conquers even its allies, is limited.
Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.
Not that incongruent; look at Chinese EVs. Or TikTok.
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).
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.