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Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

I think management started turning the screws. They're doing that everywhere. Management isn't technical anymore.

One would think that someone prominent like Ian Lance Taylor or Russ Cox (who also left within this past year, as noted by another commenter) would be relatively insulated from that.

Maybe they are safe from being laid off, though you never can tell [1]. But it does not mean they enjoy the tension, the demands, the disagreements, etc that likely crop up. At their position, they can afford to not put up with that, not hold onto the enviable salary, like many others doubtlessly and begrudgingly do.

[1]: https://nerdy.dev/ex-googler

That’s not true from talking to folks. If you aren’t focused on “the right thing” you can definitely be laid off now. The right thing being AI mostly.

Some time ago the "right thing" was social, when Google tried to pivot to a social media company with Circles or whatever; that didn't work out, but I don't recall people got laid off at the time for not working on that at the time.

Russ Cox didn't leave. He's still on the Go team at Google, but he's stepped down from his position as tech lead.

It is almost the same, Anders Hejlsberg still colaborates with the .NET / C# teams, however others now drive where it goes.

Funny thing is I think Russ is working on AI stuff which leadership really approve of!

Now that you mention it,

"Introducing Genkit for Go: Build scalable AI-powered apps in Go"

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-genkit-for-...

Which is to be expected, there won't be any corporate sponsored language left without AI tooling being pushed.

Why would you think that? You still have management, you have to go through perf calibration and justify your performance. Engineering like most human profesional activities is a very social endeavor where you rely on the people that surround you and you always have people pressuring you to do something.

> you have to go through perf calibration and justify your performance

He did sound relatively defeated when he accused himself of not accurately predicting the future needs of Go users, as if it were even possible!

Maybe management has just been unjustly critical of his performance, and he's taking it too much to heart? Hard to tell, but I just get that feeling.

Insulated by whom? Most of the old time sr Eng mgmt is either gone (replaced by oracle people, or people like them) or have shifted to that mode of operation.

Or management is cynically thinking they could get more bang for their buck with multiple people (I gotta imagine at 19 years at google gets you a healthy multiple compared to new hires)

Not to mention the current push to "grow" in low cost locations. Google is laying off people in the US but rapidly hiring in India and Poland.

Management is more technical fallacied than it's ever been: HR believe they are fine tunng for good.

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