653
Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’
(www.hindustantimes.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
653 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
59429 readers
3110 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait... You get 350k doing python coding?!
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.
$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.