Yesterday, the news about “Google’s entire Python team being laid off” flooded social media. In fact, this news originated from two technical community websites (the one most frequently cited is below), and it is not an official statement from Google.
This action naturally raises various speculations, especially during sensitive times, people naturally associate it with the current internet sensation—Artificial Intelligence (AI), leading some to write:
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Google is an AI-first company Google’s future is closely tied to its AI products All AI is written in Python. Google has laid off its entire Python team. |
In reality, this has nothing to do with AI; this Python team was not involved in developing large models or AI products. Google is simply cutting costs by relocating the team from the U.S. to Munich, Germany.
(Google realized that paying this group an annual salary of $800,000 was merely allowing them to wear loose t-shirts and plan their political activities, so they moved this functional team to Munich, while CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research has 15,000 PhD engineers, all earning a fixed salary of 50,000 euros per year.) Some students also mentioned:This is the recent standard at Google. About a year ago, they laid off upper support for GCP and replaced them with cheaper workers.I won’t say which MAAN_ (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google), but half of the recruiters are now in India. Coincidentally, it was MAAN_ that laid me off recently, rather than trying to find me another position internally, which was mind-blowing. If MAANG wants to retain top talent, perhaps they need to focus more on long-term sustainability, as multiple rounds of layoffs create endless uncertainty, uneven morale, and quite a miserable atmosphere, with vague popular slogans and cheap benefit cuts.Returning to the question in the title: What Does Google’s Layoff of the Entire Python Team Indicate? It signifies two points:
- In today’s not-so-optimistic economic climate, any business will focus on “cost reduction and efficiency improvement”; often, the priority is to cut costs, which is simple, while improving efficiency is not so straightforward.
- Google is no longer the god-like company it once was; it has become an ordinary IT company, although it remains one of the IT giants.
The companies that are currently seen as god-like are OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.