Google layoffs: Company fires entire Python team for 'cheaper labour'

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.

They also used to participate in illegal wage suppressing secret anti-poaching agreements, so this doesn’t seem so far out of line.

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.

Yet somehow they keep adding value (so far).

At least they don't wish it to C++ away...

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.

Eh… never attribute to a Plan that which is adequately explained by org chart politics?

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.

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).

Youtube has been rewritten in c++/java eons ago.

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.

Originally yes, nowadays probably not as much.