Google employees broke the news that the Python foundation team was disbanded in situ

The Heart of the Machine

2024-04-28 14:28Posted on the official account of Beijing Heart of Machines

Reported by the Heart of the Machine

Edit: Egg Sauce

Google fired the entire Python foundation team?

"It's a tough day when everybody you're working with, including your supervisor, is being laid off — oh, it's the position being cut, and you're asked to onboard their replacements, who are told to hold the same position in a different country, but they're not happy about it. 」

Thomas Wouters, who posted the event, was described as "Googlers, Python Steering Committee, and Python 3.12 and 3.13 Release Leads."

The news alarmed many developers in the field, including Soumith Chintala, founder of PyTorch and a distinguished engineer at Meta:

The most discussed, of course, is the reason for the abolition.

Specifically, instead of completely dismantling the Python foundation team, Google laid off the team in the U.S. and rebuilt the team in Munich, Germany.

This approach should be based on cost considerations:

Google pays employees by region. As I recall, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle were full salaries, with a percentage discount in other areas. If you live in the U.S. but not in one of these metropolises, wages may be around 15% lower.

Yesterday's layoffs seem to be seen as restructuring. Some teams have been completely disbanded. Some have merged (two teams → one team).

It does seem that a model exists that favors people in low-cost areas. For example, two teams merge, the higher-cost manager is fired, or the entire team is fired, and then those responsibilities are re-assumed by someone in the lower-paid office.

Given the high salaries that Google pays its employees in the United States, in a way, layoffs would significantly increase profits. However, there are also many benefits to hiring in the U.S. – a strong talent pool, keeping teams running in the same region/time zone, etc.

"What people don't understand is whether the work they're doing is really going to give Google $5 million a year for 10 people, or if it can be done by two very smart Python guys." The key to technical layoffs is not that they don't do important work, but that they have large teams to do what can basically be done by teams of two. 」

The problem is, the team seems to have done a lot of work that is also critical to Google internally:

But this time, some argue that cutting the base team is a strategy taken by Google:

Meta clearly drives most of CPython's efficiency. Most of the items listed are stable, so it's wise for Google to let the community push it forward, and they just use it (you know, "we have managers who are very good at work-life balance" and "marathons rather than sprints")

Google's internal Python, at least for non-AI businesses, feels very different from the defaults that are different elsewhere in the world. This can have a wide range of side effects that end up aligning with the external Python community.

To put it another way, this might be good news for Meta:

What do you think?

Reference Links:

https://social.coop/@Yhg1s/112332127058328855

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

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