Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’

lautan@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 646 points – Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’
hindustantimes.com

Google layoffs: The company plans to set up a new team in Munich, Germany which would act as "cheaper" labour, the report claimed.

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Google's death spiral will take a while but it's clearly circle the drain.

It will likely never completely die the same way IBM never died but it will stop being the desired placed for new graduates.

The fundamental problem with these businesses is that they are Too Big To Fail. Which is to say, they'll have a low-interest line of credit and enormous historic revenue streams that carry them decades past what should be an expiration date.

If a better Search Engine pops up, Google can either buy them out or vexatiously litigate them into the ground. If they start losing ground to Microsoft or Facebook, their treasury can simply hedge the losses by purchasing their rivals' stock. If they face an outside challenger - a ByteDance or a Pinstorm - they can lobby the Feds to lock out the competition or buffer their weak sales by winning more federal contracts from the PRISM program.

And, in the end, they'll always have their IP. Decades of accumulated "we developed a special coding technique for pressing a button, so now you owe us money any time you press a button" basic legacy infrastructure that everyone else will be forced to license by a captured judiciary/regulatory body.

Like GE and Walt Disney and Authentic Brands Group, they don't actually have to make anything in the end. They can reap tens of billions of dollars by collecting rents on the company legacy.

Just zombie firms feasting on the brains of smaller businesses and retail customers forever and ever and ever.

Which is annoying as people will say yeah but capitalism will bring competition. If Google isn’t doing well someone else will step up.

But no. They don’t. Google will be to big to fail and we will support them like you said.

capitalism will bring competition

Because we're all trapped in the Primitive Accumulationist mindset long after the frontier has closed. Now there's no more worlds to be conquered. The only question is who has the cheapest lines of credit.

they can lobby the Feds

The reason why Tik Tok is getting banned

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act

Foreign governments and businesses have always been allowed to lobby US officials, under the condition that they register as agents of another government.

Banning TikTok doesn't prevent business agents from Singapore or China from lobbying in the US. It doesn't even prevent ByteDance specifically from lobbying in the US.

Ok? They still banned tik Tok because it was a threat to alphabet

The Senate dropped the original TikTok Ban Bill as a stand alone. The House stapled the TikTok ban to its Ukraine relief bill, which Schumer considered a Must-Pass. There's no shortage of Silicon Valley shills in the Dem Majority US Senate, but that's not why the amendment ultimately succeeded.

This is because Steven Mnuchin is trying to force a buyout for personal gain and lobbying Congressional Republicans to do his dirty work. Its got far less to do with Sundar Pichai fearing that TikTok might eclipse YouTube.

That's nice. Doesn't change what I said but whatever.

If you track the history of the failed independent TikTok bill in the Senate, you'll understand the situation better.

Source: I've done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).

That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they'll pay you every year is meaningless if they'll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.

They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we're a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.

Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP's move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?

IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They'll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.

the two big tech companies that showed people how "fun" an office could be. They're now relegated to normal companies...and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners

  1. Stop making work engaging
  2. The geniuses act less engaged and leave or get salty (the Dead Sea Effect)
  3. "Why would millennials do this to us?"

Seems Google forgot what made it great.

But it's correctable:

  • let the smart people be smart
  • hire and organize worker bees around the hard work of maintenance and code evolution that isn't SRE
  • don't give up on slow starts (ohai Wave)
  • run the old folks home for beloved projects that are just PR wins to keep people happy (ohai gReader, Picasa, and a cast of thousands)

Worker-bees don't need to save the world every quarter. They also don't earn the big bucks, but form the ecosystem to retain culture amid superstar churn.

Build a functional company again. And fire the people thinking quarter by quarter.

  • Pichai ignores the fact that part of the reason the pay is so well at Big Tech is that they’re paying you to not have ethics. His failure to understand that is gonna seriously hurt Google.
  • Looking for cheaper labor.. in Germany? Where worker protections are WAY stronger than in the US? Lol. (That’s not a shot at Germany. That’s commentary on American labor protections, or lack thereof).

Its not a death spiral but a typical downturn caused by poor leadership. nothing hard for a capable board to rectify.

At googles core their business model could still stomp the competition with capable leadership. AI is simply not the disruptor being marketed.

Dunno where I saw the headline but supposedly big tech isnt the place fresh graduates dream of going to as their first place.

Google is too big to fail. Yes they'll lose a lot of customers and products but they only need to keep the ads and maybe google cloud engine running. Everything else is irrelevant until Google.com becomes irrelevant.

Sundar Pichai-led company

Is that really a better description than just saying Google?

CEOs. Name them. Shame them.

The board of directors probably plays bigger roles when it comes to layoffs than the C-Suites.

So no ones at fault, if companies knew that they could save so much money. Apparently CEOs do fuck all and banking hundreds of millions.

What exactly does this accomplish?

Personally I like seeing his name nailed to the worst era in Google’s history. The company has gone into the shitter since he arrived.

Microsoft and Google have indian CEOs so they can penetrate the billion people market (indians are deeply patriotic, and it plays into overall brand loyalty) and these companies plan lower costs while doing so.

What's a few million dollar paid for a (specifically chosen for the purpose) CEO, when you can make billions by using it to gain grounds in a emerging market.

Win-Win

Cheaper labour in the most expensive town in a country that is well known for high labour costs?

Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap. 100k is a very very good salary over here.

Yeah, but you still have to pay social taxes on top for every worker. That's why salary and labour cost are two different things. And boy is it a difference in Germany.

And as far as I've been led to believe, workers in the USA will be bullied into not taking any time off. Germans will take their entitled holidays and use sick leave when they are sick.

Workers in the US may not even have sick time. They do make more money though, probably because lots of European tech workers come to the US for better pay.

In practice anyone with this salary is likely to have at least 2 weeks + 10 or so federal holidays. It's the retail and factory folks who are hurt most there.

Vacation time is not sick time. If you want any type of vacation at all, you need to plan ahead of time. Offering only 2 weeks is a joke. If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.

Monitoring and rationing sick time is like limiting bathroom breaks or coffee time. if your job does it, you have a crappy employer.

If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.

I have never worked anywhere in the United States with a policy like that. It may be your experience but it's certainly not the norm.

Pretty sure they are saying that if you have 10 days PTO and you use one of them when sick, you no longer get a full two weeks' vacation as you'll have an uncovered day. With a full 10 days, I could clock out Friday evening, get on a flight to my vacation destination, catch a return flight the afternoon of the 19th and be back to work on the 20th. With only 9, I either need to work until next Monday and get on the plane that night, or cut my vacation short to fly back in the 16th and work the 17th. You effectively lose up to 3 whole days of downtime on vacation for being unable to work due to illness once a year.

Compared to Valley workers, Germans are still cheap.

So is West Virginia or Oklahoma.

True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.

If only there was a way to, like, have workers work on things without having to be anywhere near the office. Like distance workers or something, then you could hire people from all over the country in cheap places! Ah well, we need that face time though! ~Executives

But salary does not equal labour cost.

Even doubling the salary is far less than what you'd pay in the US, and as a rule of thumb, German labour, including all the indirect costs, is about twice the gross salary.

Even doubling the salary is far less than what you’d pay in the US,

I'm certain there's plenty of Python programmers available in the United States for less than $200,000 per year.

These python programmers are literally maintainers of the language. They're not a dime a dozen. Not saying it's impossible or anything but you're looking to get very high caliber engineers for under 140k

Take home or total cost?

For instance, is there a pension to be funded with costs not included in that 100k?

Could easily be that they have a bunch of people in Munich they can not fire since German labour laws are at least compared to a lot of places not that bad and they have to come up with some work for them. So having them work on this is still cheaper then having the people in the valley plus "useless" people in Munich.

You know where there is also cheaper labor? Other places in the US that are not in Bay Area CA.

I don't think Google pays significantly less in other US cities.

Besides, the kind of people who has the right experience to be hired by Google isn't cheap.

Maybe they will save money because they don't have to offer healthcare?

Employers in Germany have to bear half of the mandatory social security contributions.
This is on top of gross salary and includes mandatory health insurance.

Sundar Pichai will go down as one of the worst tech CEOs. Dude appears as such a nice guy from podcasts I've listened with him but really awful at his job and has zero consistent personality. He's a straight up corporate robot with no original opinions or idealogies. Unfortunately, none of that is visible or really matters because Google has infinite source of ad money so any KPIs are made irrelevant.

It's like he looked at Carly Fiorina's run on HP and said "hold my beer".

The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it's Raghaven who's being enabled by Sundar to do it. They've been hit with the problem that Ads isn't growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it's no wonder why. It's clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it's enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he's deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.

Google, who was famous for employing Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) is now firing their python team. I wonder why they didn't reassign them to the ML/AI division.

Guido van Rossum is working at Microsoft now.

Ahhh, the truest sign of a company in decline, cutting costs by firing talented people.

While reporting record profits! lmao you can't make this shit up.

Until a couple years from now when they wonder why other companies are destroying them, and they become a shell of their former self. THE literal case study on this is GE.

Making CEO decisions, is easy for AI. Cant AI just replace these CEO's more readily than programmers.

"you are a corporate ceo of a large web search and web services company. Write a document detailing corporate strategies to increase profits by 6%"

Very well! To increase profits, increase the price of every service you offer by 15%, as that will offset potential customer losses and come to a 6% profit increase!

The only staff who need firing is Sundar. Google and android should have been easy better by now but he made them stagnant.

Android is still the best mobile os but it could have been even better under better leadership. Plus they could have enabled and experimented with the OEM's to allow for additional hardware buttons, button remapping, a native Dex on all Androids, official gcam port to all OEM's so they don't need to make their own camera algorithms and even the cheapest droid could have had flagship level cameras.

And we haven't even touched on software yet....

Fire his useless ass

Why would it be in googles interest to provide better cameras to OEMs? Google has to love that people buy pixel phones because other vendors cameras are years behind

Pixels are a minuscule fraction of Android devices. Google would get more money by improving Android than by trying to increase their own marketshare.

Because the market is bigger than Pixels and they could license much of it (I'd like to see more of it as open source, but it's easier for a corporation to justify licensing the cutting edge stuff). I think a lot of OEMs would like access to Night Sight

Of course a lot of OEMs would like it, but google is incentivised to keep the best part of Android as pixel exclusives.

Regardless of the actual software processing details, in the wider population of Android consumers I'm pretty sure it's Samsung that has the reputation for photography.

Samsung's advertising focus is on advertising things that people understand and think they want, not AI assistants and cleaner versions of Android. Most of the reviews of the Pixel 8 criticise no telephoto lens while Samsung tends to have an excess being shown off.

Like everything Google does, I'm not sure it is any good at understanding people as humans rather than people as aggregate statistical models and that shows in its consumer devices.

Samsung's 10x camera is amazing, I'm pretty miffed they dropped down to a digial zoom 10x though and made it a 5x on the S24 series, even if it gives other benefits like higher quality mid zooms between the 3x and 10x.

I really hope they bring it back or someone else has a good 10x lens by the time I need a new phone.

Fuck only having a 3x after having a 10x

I think this is the first time in my life I read the words cheaper and Munich in the same sentence

Compared to software developer compensation in California, Germany is waaaay cheaper.

Heck, Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any of their US offices. You would make more by working for Google in Raleigh, North Carolina than in Munich.

The only European city that pays as well as the US is Zürich. The pay is really good there, about the same as Seattle.

Unfortunately cost of life in Zurich is much higher than Seattle!

Sad but true. Munich is extremely expensive for people living there and not owning their homes, which is a large portion of the population and salaries for highly skilled individuals is a complete joke.

Yeah, how’s that going to be cheaper? Unions in Germany aren’t known for that. Unless Germany has an easier route to cheaper foreign workers with visas working there?

Salariés are thrice are high in the usa, and rent is probably twice the amount. Munich is definitely cheaper than cali. They could have also moved to a cheaper place within the USA, however. Also local regulations don't apply to big company in the USA, Germany might require subtler bribing.

Also, software people are not unionised in Germany, despite many of us being proper engineers (i.e. with a title), meaning it should be very easy. Well, my current company let me understand I should avoid talking about even a Betriebsrat (= mini union) if I were to make a career there sooo... No need to worry about that. Probably why they're not moving to e.g. Paris. Good luck getting qualified people not covered by a "convention collective".

Being told this sentence would result in me being one step closer to the exit door. It's not a KO criteria but one step closer to the exit.

Isn't the works committee just that part of management that's been elected by the employees?

Munich is cheaper for Google than literally any city in the US.

Software developer compensations are insanely high in the US, at least at these multinational corporations.

I bet they won't be paying upwards of 200k salaries there though.

Cheap labor = moving entire python workforce to other countries.

Capitalism 101

Yet we stubbornly refuse to eat the rich. It would take just one billionaire CEO cannibalized in front of the company's headquarters, and the vibes would flip.

I'm sitting here with my knife and fork, waiting.

For a blissful moment I thought the headline was saying "Google Lays Off Sundar Pichai"

Before I got the hyphen I was starting to get down on the floor.

Even if he gets layed off or even fired, he will still receive a larger compensation package than either you or I will receive as compensation in the whole of our working lives, most likely both of ours together his compensation package will dwarf even ten times what we will make together our whole lives.

And this is if he does the shittiest job he can possibly do and gets fired.

CEOs are sociopaths.

To be totally honest, i might be a sociopath too if i only have to work for a year and have enough money for a many generations

Honestly, I think there is something to that. You probably do need to be a sociopath in order to become a CEO like that, but I’d also buy that becoming wealthy, by any means, is probably going to change you and your worldview whether you like it or not

Money isn't quite zero sum, but you don't need to zoom in very far for it certainly look like it.

Then you start trying to think about better solutions. If you've got a decent understanding of human history you can see the solutions you come up with played out over the last 5,000 years of human civilization with various levels of success or massive failures resulting in war, slavery, or famine.

Then you think about what would happen if we all return to subsistence farming to avoid all that where our entire world be what we see with our eyes in the morning when we get out of bed. Then again you realize you're back to war, slavery, or famine except on a micro scale with just yourself and your neighbor instead of on a nation-state sized version.

The least-worse (not the best, because there is no best) solution I can think of at the moment is a nation that jumpstarts on war, slavery, and/or famine, and transitions to an egalitarian socialist society when its powerful and rich enough. That still doesn't remove the very human element of corruption or exploitation that just want more than that 'perfect society' would produce.

Honestly he’s doing a great job of slowly killing the company.

I think he might be an infiltrator

Sent by who? Apple? Microsoft? Russia?

Maybe we're going into conspiracy theory territory, but he's surely acting like he was sent by a competitor

Everyone needs a union

The irony is that they are moving to Germany, one of the most unionized countries in the entire world. Also not exactly "cheap" labor.

the IT wages in Germany aren't as high, you're looking at €3000-€5000 above your typical factory worker for the type of work they seem to be looking for, BUT therefor they also have German levels of workers right XD, just wait 5 years when Google decides to outsource somewhere else again, and realizes it can't afford to pay the severance of all those employees

IT wages may not be as high in Germany as in Silicon Valley (cost of living is also a lot lower), but they are certainly a far cry from "cheap." Also, German workers have much, much better labor conditions overall than US workers. They aren't easy to cast aside like Google has a habit of doing.

I really hope you don't mean the python people, the last thing I want in German IT is python dumbfucks... :(

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München is not cheap city to reside in nor are the suburbs.

München isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than San Francisco

True, but San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Munich is the most expensive place to live in Germany and one of the most expensive in Europe so the move is still somewhat questionable.

Someone else in the comments said that it might be due to having a workforce in Munich that can't be easily fired because of German labor laws, and that could be an explanation

Has this CEO done anything good?

For shareholders, he has increased the share price and dividends.

It seems he has done this via Boeing route of management, short term gain for long term decline.

It's the best route to take as a CEO though. Google's short term gain is also lining his pockets, he can suck the company dry and have enough money to never have to work again.

Lot of knowledge to just throw out there, Sundar.

Let's hope your documentation can handle it, or a whole lot of important stuff is going to take forever to fix if/when it breaks

Really dumb considering the recent FTC noncompete ruling lol

They're just going to throw a few more projects on the Google graveyard then

google is in a free fall

Their financials are doing pretty great, but like any enshitification, the UX is degraded by the day to squeeze money out of everything.

KPIs might be great, but land for new competitors is being created by Google itself

I'd never invest money in Google right now

Out of curiosity, does anybody know how big was the team?

Python team was ~10 people I think

10 * 350k of total comp is 3.5 million dollars... guessing the german counterparts probably get 120k of total comp so only 1.2 million dollars, assuming it's 1:1 staff swap.

Never heard of american software engineers at FAANG getting anything less than superstar sf bay wages, never heard of crazy wages in all of the EU for any kind of worker.... but maybe someone can correct me on the german team's salaries.

Wait... You get 350k doing python coding?!

$350k includes the salary but also all of the health insurance benefits, taxes, stock options, office space and perks, compute hardware, software services… the works. An employer will have an averaged overhead factor for their skilled workforce, which can be anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 typically. A worker with an annual pre-tax salary of $140k could cost Google $350k in overall expenses per year. Labor is expensive.

Also, these people weren’t just making simple Python scripts. Most of them were contributing core functionality into Python itself and managing the internal Python version and the ecosystem of Google software stacks that depend on it.

The Python team weren't just random folks writing Python. Several are core Python contributors who maintained official forks, ran library matching for internal software, and gave back to the language and community. They didn't just go for cheaper talent, they replaced some arguably irreplaceable engineers and shat over OSS at the same time.

You get that working for Google in Bay Area if you're senior, no matter the language.

Those guys were participating in Python itself, maintaining the Python tooling for the whole company, served as a help desk for everything Python... Yeah I'm pretty sure they had a big salary.

It's not your little "glue libraries together" Python coding.

People at Google Munich pull north of 150k euros TC, so with taxes, insurance etc will end up costing Google around 200k. Still significant savings.

Just for the sake of comparison, Alphabet had $308 billion in revenue and $74 billion in profit in 2023 if I’m reading the numbers correctly. But they need cheaper labour.

Publicly traded companies do not have a duty to pay their workers, they have a duty to pay their shareholders and to maximize profits.

If you can get the same job done overseas for less money why would you pay american labor? what's the benefit?

Not saying I like the system, just saying that's how it is. Gotta have some kind of fine or penalty for outsourcing, offshoring and 1099 contracting labor if you really want to fix it.

Shit should be changed but the majority election system is funded by the ownership class who greatly benefits from this not changing.

If all of us fire all of our employee at the same time, then all of us hire each other employee again, we will got them cheaper.