Reported by Machine HeartEditor: Dan Jiang
What? Google has laid off the entire Python core team?
“When everyone you work directly with, including your supervisor, is laid off – oh, their positions are eliminated, and you are asked to onboard their replacements, who are told to take the same positions in different countries, but they are not happy about it, it’s a tough day.”
Thomas Wouters, who posted this update, describes himself as a “Google employee, Python Steering Council member, and release manager for Python 3.12 and 3.13.”
This news has shocked many developers in the field, including Soumith Chintala, founder of PyTorch and distinguished engineer at Meta:
The most discussed topic, of course, is the reason for the layoffs.
Specifically, Google is not completely dissolving the Python core team, but rather laying off the team in the United States and re-establishing it in Munich, Germany.
This approach seems to be driven by cost considerations:
Google pays employees based on their location. I remember that San Francisco, New York, and Seattle offer full salaries, while other regions have a certain percentage discount. If you live in the U.S. but not in one of these major cities, your salary might be about 15% lower.
Yesterday’s layoffs seem to be viewed as a reorganization. Some teams have been completely dissolved. Others have merged (two teams → one team).
There appears to be a pattern favoring lower-cost regions. For example, two teams merge, the higher-cost manager is laid off, or an entire team is laid off, and those responsibilities are taken over by personnel from lower-salary offices.
Given that Google offers high salaries to U.S. employees, it can be said that layoffs would significantly increase profits. However, there are many advantages to hiring in the U.S. – a strong talent pool, maintaining team operations in the same region/time zone, etc.
Some have pointed out: “What people don’t understand is whether the work they do really brings Google $5 million a year in value, or if it can be done by two very smart Python experts. The key to technical layoffs is not that they aren’t doing important work, but that there are large teams doing things that could essentially be handled by a two-person team.”
The issue is that the team seems to have completed a significant amount of work that is crucial to Google internally:
However, some believe that the dissolution of the core team is a strategy taken by Google:
Meta has clearly driven much of the efficiency of CPython. Most of the listed projects are stable, so it makes sense for Google to let the community push it forward while they just use it (you know, “we have managers who are very good at balancing work and life” and “marathon, not sprint”)
Internally, Python at Google, at least for non-AI business, feels very different from the default elsewhere in the world. This could have widespread side effects on ultimately aligning with the external Python community.
Looking at it from another angle, 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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