It's pretty tough to be met with the realization that big tech companies' code education initiatives, and their support of things in the US like H-1B visas, all stem from a coldly calculated strategy to make the compensation for programmers get and stay as low as possible.
It's an interesting contrast to how Google used to operate; pay high salaries to get the best talent they could get their hands on. Looks like they've shifted to keeping the lights on and cutting costs now.
They’re also doing stock buybacks and dividends. Ads print money but they’ve basically thrown their hands up and admitted they don’t know how to invest that money into anything else. Google is at cruising altitude now, so cost cutting makes sense I guess.
Well, if we look back to those times, it was effective strategy to spray good money to keep talents occupied with dead end products because access to cheap VC money was plentiful due to prosperous decade of zero interest giving anyone ability to compete the slow moving behemoth with innovation as the crowd as hungry to accept new and shiny.
Google also managed to lure away talents out of promising places to snuff any competition risks.
Now that zero interest days of prosperity is effectively gone, economy and money is tight, everything easy had already been captured by Big Tech… now is the risk free time to ditch the dead weights.
Anything easy under the sun has now 20+ clones, expectations are immense, crowd are cautious to accept anything new, no supply of long time cash to burn due ti cautious VCs & non-zero interest rates, plenty regulations to block all privacy shenanigans or other known loopholes.
We forget that, the great ones(except M$) were all built in era of lax digital & privacy era and easy supply of cash. Anyone having any idea was showered with cash. Now those days are over. Any threat of competition is minimal.
If I were google, this is the perfect time to shed some weight given all of the above.
The strategy hasn't changed. "Pay high salaries" doesn't happen in a vacuum. They only ever paid a small premium above the next best offer the workers had, and the second best offer only ever paid a small premium over the third best offer, and so on down the line.
Google is still paying comparatively high salaries to get the best talent, but, thanks to the proliferation of developers, everyone else doesn't have to fight over the scraps anymore. There is enough to go around for everyone. As such, "mom and pop" don't have to pay as much to the not-so-great talent, which means the premiums found by the time you get al the way up to Google are starting from a much lower baseline.
Google, Apple, and other large tech companies conspired illegally not to poach employees, and we should not be surprised by this at all. This is their MO.
They are cheats and liars and actively work against their employees at best.
I'm not sure how it's "tough" to realize this. This has been going on for decades, and people are just now starting to care because the job market isn't growing like it had been for years.
Apparently the new team is in Munich, where I live. Now, in Germany, Munich is almost a synonym for "ridiculously expensive". It's really difficult to believe that anyone would move here motivated by low cost. SF has higher costs, no question, but moving here because of low cost? That's hard to believe.
I wonder whether this is mostly about some management power struggle.
I think there's a few things here; some leaders in TI have long hated python and wished it would Go away, and I think they finally "won" in convincing their bosses to start that process by reducing the throughput of the python team.
I think it's also possible leadership wants to indicate to long-term googlers that their jobs are not safe as a way to motivate their replacements. You end up with a certain amount of complacency after a decade at google.
The implication is that the workers are willing to work for less pay. Any additional cost to exist in Munich is unlikely to be much more than a rounding error in comparison to the labour cost.
Which, according to Google Search, seems to be the case – with typical software engineer salaries coming in at half of what US developers realize. But perhaps your first-hand experience sees something different?
I don't know about the US, but the fully loaded cost of a Munich software developer is well above €100k. Take-home pay is one thing, fully loaded cost is quite another.
EDIT: I should be explicit about my conclusion. Munich is cheaper than some places, but that doesn't make it the kind of place you choose if you're looking to move to if your want avoid experience developers.
The typical US developer will take home well above €100k (although Google developers generally take home considerably more than that). Rule of thumb is that the fully-loaded cost is, at minimum, 2x take home, so we're well into €200-300k territory.
> EDIT: [...] if your want avoid experience developers.
They want to avoid expensive developers, not experienced developers. There is no reason to think the new German team is lacking in any way, but they are almost certainly willing to work for a fraction of the price of a comparable developer stateside. There isn't the same kind of demand for them as compared to the US in order to juice salaries. Like was said earlier, you can hire a German developer all in for somewhere around €100k. That's nothing compared to what Google is accostomed to paying.
It is true that the there are even weaker markets out there, but they come with other costs, like cultural barriers, that start to negate the difference. Germany hits the sweet spot of developers coming cheap, and still being experienced and talented on the same level Google is accustomed to, all while sharing an American-like culture.
Labour costs are almost the entirety of the cost of developing software. The cost of existing in the city is effectively irrelevant. Munich being expensive doesn't matter.
Agreed. Munich is crazy expensive
Serbia or Romania get a much better bang for a buck.
Maybe this is part of long-term term strategy to move "commodity" roles to cheaper markets amid recent FTC decision on forbiden non-compete ...
If pricing where the issue, would you move from the most expensive area to another famously expensive area? Seems weird, which makes me suspect that it's really something else, such as orgchart politics.
Maybe tech workers need to unionize. I hope that would help protect the share of profits going to employees (avoiding or reducing cost-cutting moves like this).
That hasn't been true for some years; instead of migrating Python 2->3 most of that code got rewritten as a collection of C++ microservices (admittedly with some performance wins but a lot of newly added complexity).
I have been told by an old timer that YT is indeed the reason why there is Python at Google, and the time required for the rewrite is indeed the reason why internal devtools had to support Python.
Hmmm....I'm waking up from Gell-Mann amnesia... Moving to Germany for cheaper labor? Is Munich known as a mecca for cut-rate python programmers? Does google have a "the python team?"
Whatever is going on, its not this, this makes no sense.
