9mo ago

Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’

www.hindustantimes.com Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’

Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.

Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.

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9mo ago

Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’

www.hindustantimes.com /business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603.html

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177 comments

Google's death spiral will take a while but it's clearly circle the drain.
It will likely never completely die the same way IBM never died but it will stop being the desired placed for new graduates.
- The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they'll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.
  If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals' stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.
  And, in the end, they'll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated "we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button" basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.
  Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don't actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.
  Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.
  
  We can always hope for another Enron.
  
  Which is annoying as people will say yeah but capitalism will bring competition. If Google isn’t doing well someone else will step up.
  But no. They don’t. Google will be to big to fail and we will support them like you said.
  
  they can lobby the Feds
  The reason why Tik Tok is getting banned
- Source: I've done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).
  That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they'll pay you every year is meaningless if they'll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.
  They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we're a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.
  Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP's move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?
  IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They'll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.
  
  Openai lol.
  
  the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners
  Stop making work engaging
  The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
  "Why would millennials do this to us?"
  Seems Google forgot what made it great.
  But it's correctable:
  let the smart people be smart
  hire and organize worker bees around the hard work of maintenance and code evolution that isn't SRE
  don't give up on slow starts (ohai Wave)
  run the old folks home for beloved projects that are just PR wins to keep people happy (ohai gReader, Picasa, and a cast of thousands)
  Worker-bees don't need to save the world every quarter. They also don't earn the big bucks, but form the ecosystem to retain culture amid superstar churn.
  Build a functional company again. And fire the people thinking quarter by quarter.
- Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
  Looking for cheaper labor.. in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).
  
  European salaries for software developers are half of what they are in the USA. It's a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, honestly.
  Source: software developer in Europe who usually works for American companies.
- Its not a death spiral but a typical downturn caused by poor leadership. nothing hard for a capable board to rectify.
  At googles core their business model could still stomp the competition with capable leadership. AI is simply not the disruptor being marketed.
- Dunno where I saw the headline but supposedly big tech isnt the place fresh graduates dream of going to as their first place.
- Google is too big to fail. Yes they'll lose a lot of customers and products but they only need to keep the ads and maybe google cloud engine running. Everything else is irrelevant until Google.com becomes irrelevant.

Please treat this as an explanation, and not an apology for big tech. If you work in tech, or are thinking about it, understand the rules of the game :
First, a new skill goes hot - maybe functionally superior, may just be a trend. In tech, it’s always the new shiny.
Demand for skills outstrips supply
Salaries go up !
Big tech flex, offer big money to hoover up the talent. Sometimes it’s for projects, sometimes it’s just to keep them out of the hands of competition, in case the trend becomes a standard
Time passes
Chasing big salaries, lots of people acquire the skill.
Supply outstrips demand, skill becomes a commodity.
Salaries come down
Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending, but at the very least - are now available at market at a much lower rate. If you include globalisation, it could be 30% of what they are paying.
The high salary hires get cut, because there’s a new skill trending, or, the same skill is now available at much lower rate .
Everyone is shocked !
This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing
- You're missing the whole "growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs"
  And
  "Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they're cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it's too late you laid off the entire original team"
- Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending
  I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops "trending". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.
  But also you're not just supporting the language. You're supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.
  Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.
  Also, the story of Boeing's planes-that-don't-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.
  This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing
  Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That's the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm's bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.
  
  Python is great for what it is, but the best language developed in your lifetime? Its type system is janky and bolted on. A good type system is one of the main things I look for to call a programming language great.
  
  That's the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm's bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.
  This, as with enshittification in general, is a symptom of our fucked up culture that views money as a virtue. And with the business culture in particular, regardless of cartel or monopoly status, if the bottom line gets better the managers are doing a “good job” and almost nobody cares about inconveniences to customers or tarnishing of the brand.
- Where is the "legacy system needs to be maintained, salary goes up"? But yeah, it's a pretty good picture of the tech landscape
- Sounds like these CEOs suck at CEOing

Sundar Pichai-led company
Is that really a better description than just saying Google?
- CEOs. Name them. Shame them.
  
  Folks need to start naming Prabhakar Raghavan, he’s the mother fucker that fucked up the search side to increase ad revenue, which is what Pacai hired him to do like a good little McKinsey alum
  
  The board of directors probably plays bigger roles when it comes to layoffs than the C-Suites.
  
  What exactly does this accomplish?
- Personally I like seeing his name nailed to the worst era in Google’s history. The company has gone into the shitter since he arrived.
- It's not Google technically: it's alphabet. Which is why they phrased it like that.
  
  Why not just: "Alphabet (e.g. Google)"?
- Hindustan Times is an Indian site. Sundar Pichai is Indian.
- Microsoft and Google have indian CEOs so they can penetrate the billion people market (indians are deeply patriotic, and it plays into overall brand loyalty) and these companies plan lower costs while doing so.
  What's a few million dollar paid for a (specifically chosen for the purpose) CEO, when you can make billions by using it to gain grounds in a emerging market.
  Win-Win

Sundar Pichai will go down as one of the worst tech CEOs. Dude appears as such a nice guy from podcasts I've listened with him but really awful at his job and has zero consistent personality. He's a straight up corporate robot with no original opinions or idealogies. Unfortunately, none of that is visible or really matters because Google has infinite source of ad money so any KPIs are made irrelevant.
- It's like he looked at Carly Fiorina's run on HP and said "hold my beer".
- The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it's Raghaven who's being enabled by Sundar to do it. They've been hit with the problem that Ads isn't growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it's no wonder why. It's clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it's enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he's deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.

Cheaper labour in the most expensive town in a country that is well known for high labour costs?
- Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.
  
  When you have a much better social safety net, work-life balance and in general can expect to be treated like a human and not a work-battery to be used up and discarded, people are satisfied with much less money.
  Should they maybe instead just try that in the US? Nah, of course not.
  
  Yeah, but you still have to pay social taxes on top for every worker. That's why salary and labour cost are two different things. And boy is it a difference in Germany.
  
  Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap.
  So is West Virginia or Oklahoma.
  
  But salary does not equal labour cost.
  
  Take home or total cost?
  For instance, is there a pension to be funded with costs not included in that 100k?
- Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus "useless" people in Munich.
- You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.
  
  I don't think Google pays significantly less in other US cities.
  Besides, the kind of people who has the right experience to be hired by Google isn't cheap.
- Maybe they will save money because they don't have to offer healthcare?
  
  Employers in Germany have to bear half of the mandatory social security contributions.
  This is on top of gross salary and includes mandatory health insurance.
  
  That was my first thought.
- https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/san-francisco-bay-area
  vs
  https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/locations/munich-metro-region
  Even if you assume that additional labour costs are a bit higher in Germany, there's no way on earth that it could explain the difference of the Bay Area-median being over 3 times higher.

Google, who was famous for employing Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) is now firing their python team. I wonder why they didn't reassign them to the ML/AI division.
Guido van Rossum is working at Microsoft now.

Making CEO decisions, is easy for AI. Cant AI just replace these CEO's more readily than programmers.
- "you are a corporate ceo of a large web search and web services company. Write a document detailing corporate strategies to increase profits by 6%"
  
  Very well! To increase profits, increase the price of every service you offer by 15%, as that will offset potential customer losses and come to a 6% profit increase!
- hot take: Sundar Pichai is the first LLM CEO.
  
  What about zuckerbot? I thought he was the first

Ahhh, the truest sign of a company in decline, cutting costs by firing talented people.
- While reporting record profits! lmao you can't make this shit up.
  
  Until a couple years from now when they wonder why other companies are destroying them, and they become a shell of their former self. THE literal case study on this is GE.

I think this is the first time in my life I read the words cheaper and Munich in the same sentence
- Compared to software developer compensation in California, Germany is waaaay cheaper.
  Heck, Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any of their US offices. You would make more by working for Google in Raleigh, North Carolina than in Munich.
  The only European city that pays as well as the US is Zürich. The pay is really good there, about the same as Seattle.
  
  Unfortunately cost of life in Zurich is much higher than Seattle!
  
  Sad but true. Munich is extremely expensive for people living there and not owning their homes, which is a large portion of the population and salaries for highly skilled individuals is a complete joke.
- Yeah, how’s that going to be cheaper? Unions in Germany aren’t known for that. Unless Germany has an easier route to cheaper foreign workers with visas working there?
  
  Salariés are thrice are high in the usa, and rent is probably twice the amount. Munich is definitely cheaper than cali. They could have also moved to a cheaper place within the USA, however. Also local regulations don't apply to big company in the USA, Germany might require subtler bribing.
  Also, software people are not unionised in Germany, despite many of us being proper engineers (i.e. with a title), meaning it should be very easy. Well, my current company let me understand I should avoid talking about even a Betriebsrat (= mini union) if I were to make a career there sooo... No need to worry about that. Probably why they're not moving to e.g. Paris. Good luck getting qualified people not covered by a "convention collective".
  
  We are speaking of Munich. Nothing is cheap in this city.
  
  American google SWE wages: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer?country=254
  Munich SWE wages: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/munich-deu
  
  Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any city in the US.
  Software developer compensations are insanely high in the US, at least at these multinational corporations.
- I bet they won't be paying upwards of 200k salaries there though.

The only staff who need firing is Sundar. Google and android should have been easy better by now but he made them stagnant.
Android is still the best mobile os but it could have been even better under better leadership. Plus they could have enabled and experimented with the OEM's to allow for additional hardware buttons, button remapping, a native Dex on all Androids, official gcam port to all OEM's so they don't need to make their own camera algorithms and even the cheapest droid could have had flagship level cameras.
And we haven't even touched on software yet....
Fire his useless ass
- Why would it be in googles interest to provide better cameras to OEMs? Google has to love that people buy pixel phones because other vendors cameras are years behind
  
  Pixels are a minuscule fraction of Android devices. Google would get more money by improving Android than by trying to increase their own marketshare.
  
  Because the market is bigger than Pixels and they could license much of it (I'd like to see more of it as open source, but it's easier for a corporation to justify licensing the cutting edge stuff). I think a lot of OEMs would like access to Night Sight
  
  Regardless of the actual software processing details, in the wider population of Android consumers I'm pretty sure it's Samsung that has the reputation for photography.
  Samsung's advertising focus is on advertising things that people understand and think they want, not AI assistants and cleaner versions of Android. Most of the reviews of the Pixel 8 criticise no telephoto lens while Samsung tends to have an excess being shown off.
  Like everything Google does, I'm not sure it is any good at understanding people as humans rather than people as aggregate statistical models and that shows in its consumer devices.

Cheap labor = moving entire python workforce to other countries.
Capitalism 101
- Yet we stubbornly refuse to eat the rich. It would take just one billionaire CEO cannibalized in front of the company's headquarters, and the vibes would flip.
  
  I'm sitting here with my knife and fork, waiting.

For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying "Google Lays Off Sundar Pichai"
Before I got the hyphen I was starting to get down on the floor.
- Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.
  And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.

Get fucked Google

I’m really starting to think Google has gone to shit now.
- You are only starting to think that NOW?
- It got much worse around 2018, but they are speed running.

CEOs are sociopaths.
- To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations
  
  Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not

Honestly he’s doing a great job of slowly killing the company.
- I think he might be an infiltrator
  
  Sent by who? Apple? Microsoft? Russia?
  Maybe we're going into conspiracy theory territory, but he's surely acting like he was sent by a competitor

Everyone needs a union
- The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly "cheap" labor.
  
  the IT wages in Germany aren't as high, you're looking at €3000-€5000 above your typical factory worker for the type of work they seem to be looking for, BUT therefor they also have German levels of workers right XD, just wait 5 years when Google decides to outsource somewhere else again, and realizes it can't afford to pay the severance of all those employees
  
  I really hope you don't mean the python people, the last thing I want in German IT is python dumbfucks... :(

München is not cheap city to reside in nor are the suburbs.
- Compared to..... San Francisco?
- München isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than San Francisco
  
  True, but San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Munich is the most expensive place to live in Germany and one of the most expensive in Europe so the move is still somewhat questionable.

Has this CEO done anything good?
- For shareholders, he has increased the share price and dividends.
  It seems he has done this via Boeing route of management, short term gain for long term decline.
  
  It's the best route to take as a CEO though. Google's short term gain is also lining his pockets, he can suck the company dry and have enough money to never have to work again.

Lot of knowledge to just throw out there, Sundar.
Let's hope your documentation can handle it, or a whole lot of important stuff is going to take forever to fix if/when it breaks
- Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol
- They're just going to throw a few more projects on the Google graveyard then

google is in a free fall
- Their financials are doing pretty great, but like any enshitification, the UX is degraded by the day to squeeze money out of everything.
  
  KPIs might be great, but land for new competitors is being created by Google itself
  I'd never invest money in Google right now
- They brought it upon them.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter_layoffs/
Perhaps a bit better source. At least a bit less irritating to read.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know how big was the team?
- Python team was ~10 people I think
  
  10 * 350k of total comp is 3.5 million dollars... guessing the german counterparts probably get 120k of total comp so only 1.2 million dollars, assuming it's 1:1 staff swap.
  Never heard of american software engineers at FAANG getting anything less than superstar sf bay wages, never heard of crazy wages in all of the EU for any kind of worker.... but maybe someone can correct me on the german team's salaries.
- I believe it was entirely big.