Finishing | Zheng Liyuan
出品 | CSDN（ID：CSDNnews）
Google's good news and bad news came suddenly.
This Friday, Google's parent company Alphabet announced its first-quarter earnings report: revenue was $80.539 billion, an increase of 15% from $69.787 billion in the same period last year, the fastest growth rate since the beginning of 2022 - also released the earnings report, Meta's stock price plummeted 15%, but Google officially entered the "2 trillion club"!
Alphabet has continued to invest heavily in AI, adding generative AI capabilities to its search and many of its services. During the earnings launch, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also made a point to highlight the criticality of AI: "Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, as well as our global product footprint, prepares us for the next wave of AI innovation." ”
So it's hard to predict that in the context of such a strong commitment to AI, Google suddenly fired the entire Python foundation team?!
Here, to borrow a sharp comment from a netizen on HackerNews: "Google is an AI-first company, Google's future is closely tied to its AI products, all AI is written in Python, and Google fired the entire Python team." ”
In order to reduce costs, the new team was rebuilt in Munich
The dismissal of Google's Python infrastructure team was first revealed by a Google Python engineer named Thomas Wouters. In terms of personal introduction, Thomas Wouters is not only a Google Python engineer, but also a member of the Python steering committee and the release lead for Python 3.12 and 3.13, responsible for their overall release process.
A few days ago, Thomas Wouters posted a news on social platforms:
It was a tough day. When everyone you work directly with, including your manager, is made redundant — oh sorry, "role cut," and you're asked to onboard their replacements who are told to take on the same position in a different country, and they don't want to.
Following an industry insider who asked Thomas Wouters about his next steps and whether he needed help with the new employees to set up a union, he replied: "The new team is in Munich, they have a working committee, and we have informed the people there. Now, I'm figuring out what to do for the old team while trying not to cause them any trouble. ”
Combined with the additions of other people familiar with the matter, that is, Google has laid off the original Python foundation team in the United States and rebuilt a new team in Munich, Germany - as for the reason? Judging from the location of the team, it is likely to be for lower employment costs.
Google laid off their Python basics team and asked to train a replacement for the Munich team. This is similar to the layoffs in the finance department a few weeks ago, where some positions were moved to lower-cost foreign countries.
Not long after Thomas Wouters broke the news, it quickly spread through the developer community: for a moment, it was almost all shocked and upset.
Among them, Soumith Chintala, a distinguished engineer at Meta and the father of PyTorch, expressed his puzzlement: "Google has laid off the entire Python foundation team, and WTF! seems to have done a lot of work that is also critical to Google. ”
After learning that Google intends to rebuild the team in Munich, Soumith Chintala laments that this is the typical and sad "reconfiguration of places" of large companies. However, he still believes that "basic/core language engineers are hard to replace – they have a deep understanding of complex code and social dynamics that are hard to write down". He also said that this is an opportunity for other companies to compete for talent, and that "Meta has started to reach out, but may not be able to absorb all the engineers."
No
to 10 people
Python
The team has been understaffed for a long time
After hearing this, some people asked, "I'm curious what a Python team does, and it doesn't make sense to have a team dedicated to a programming language." ”
There are enthusiastic developers about this: almost all FAANG companies, as well as many smaller ones, have teams for every programming language they deem important. Like Google, there are teams in multiple programming languages such as C++, Rust, Python, Java, JavaScript, etc. The Python team "built a better Python by fixing upstream vulnerabilities, reducing memory consumption, etc., upgrading the Python internal installation to the latest version to ensure that the upgrade went smoothly, and submitting language feature suggestions upstream to ensure that at least Google's use cases were considered." ”
In response to this comment, @compiler-guy, an employee of Google's Python team, also stepped forward to take stock of all the work that their team is responsible for:
In addition to our contributions to the Python upstream project, we also undertook the following:
- We maintain a stable version of Python internally at Google to ensure that the entire single codebase is compatible with it. During my time on the team, we upgraded from Python 2.7 to 3.6 and then gradually to 3.11, each of which took months to more than a year. Because Google has a rule that any code submission must be responsible for all issues caused.
- We're also maintaining tools to ensure that thousands of third-party packages are continuously updated from open source releases. For packages that require Google-specific modifications, we also manage the patch queue.
- We've also customized some tools, such as pylint and black, to fit Google's coding style and overall codebase.
- We contribute to pybind11 and maintain some tools for C++ integration.
- We developed and maintained Python build system rules, including a major project to fully migrate Python rules to Starlark code so that they no longer rely on Blaze/Bazel's core engine.
- We also develop and maintain a type checker (pytype) that can make inferences on code without type comments, handle very large projects, and use a file-by-file architecture (which is my main responsibility at Google).
- We've also automated refactoring on hundreds of millions of lines of code.
And that's just part of our job:
We also provide support for Python users within Google, helping to solve complex problems and guiding newcomers to get started properly. In addition, we work with multiple teams, including machine learning and AI teams, Colaboratory and IDE teams, teams that integrate with Python bindings like protobuf, Google Cloud, which wants to provide customers with a Python runtime environment, and YouTube, which needs to maintain high performance and maintainability in a huge Python system.
After giving an overview of the work undertaken by the Python team, @compiler-guy added that "it took a few years for a team of less than 10 people to do it." Despite the lack of staff, they chose to stay for the long term because they loved their job and the team, and "the team managers did a great job of trying to ensure our work-life balance, advocating a 'long-term rather than a sprint' way of working".
In closing, @compiler-guy said, "It's the best job I've ever done, and I'm going to miss it dearly." ”
The Flutter team is also "doomed"
In addition to the Python base team, Google's Flutter team is said to have not escaped this wave of layoffs.
Different from the incomprehension and regret of the dismissal of the Python basic team, many netizens said to the Flutter team that the team was laid off: "Flutter is a joke, so this is good news", "Flutter still has so many problems to solve, what to cut, Google should increase its investment in it!"
In response to this rumor, Kevin, the product manager of Flutter and Dart, responded in person on social platforms today:
Layoffs were decided at least a few layers above our team and affected a lot of teams. A lot of good people get bad news, and a lot of great projects lose employees. Flutter and Dart have been affected no more or less than others. It's been a tough day...... Tough week.
On the same day we lost colleagues and friends, we also saw demos and new stuff in action, as well as discussions about new customers, and it was crazy. We're sad, but we're still struggling with I/O and more. We know that you care deeply about this project, this team, and the strong ecosystem we've built together.
You're nervous, I know, we all do, and you're betting on Flutter and Dart, and so am I, and so is Google.
Coupled with Google's long history of retiring products (the number of products Google has been eliminated by Google in the "Killed by Google" website is as high as 295), one user has raised concerns: "I'm sure everyone wants to know one thing: Is there anyone inside Google who is proposing to kill Flutter? If they do, I think this is the last time people will use Google to make something." ”