This Hacker News comment is quite the deep cut about Google’s recent layoff/firing of the entire Python Foundation team.
This happened the same day Alphabet reported $80.54 billion in revenue.
in addition to contributing to upstream python, we
- maintained a stable version of python within google, and made sure that everything in the monorepo worked with it. in my time on the team we moved from 2.7 to 3.6, then incrementally to 3.11, each update taking months to over a year because the rule at google is if you check any code in, you are responsible for every single breakage it causes
- maintained tools to keep thousands of third party packages constantly updated from their open source versions, with patch queues for the ones that needed google-specific changes
- had highly customised versions of tools like pylint and black, targeted to google’s style guide and overall codebase
- contributed to pybind11, and maintained tools for c++ integration
- developed and maintained build system rules for python, including a large effort to move python rules to pure starlark code rather than having them entangled in the blaze/bazel core engine
- developed and maintained a typechecker (pytype) that would do inference on code without type annotations, and work over very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
- performed automated refactorings across hundreds of millions of lines of code
and that was just the dev portion of our jobs. we also acted as a help desk of sorts for python users at google, helping troubleshoot tricky issues, and point newcomers in the right direction. plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams, the colaboratory and IDE teams, teams like protobuf that integrated with and generated python bindings, teams like google cloud who wanted to offer python runtimes to their customers, teams like youtube who had an unusually large system built in python and needed to do extraordinary things to keep it performant and maintainable.
and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the “marathon, not sprint” approach to work. as i said in another comment, it’s the best job i’ve ever had, and i’ll miss it deeply.
They have never been more profitable, made more money, or cared less about their employees and giving back to the communities that got them there. If I had worked at Google, I would not have been comfortable continuing to work there.
I plan to keep de-Googling, which is going to hurt. Several friends shared why they can’t cut ties with their products. I get it, but that is a sign of an unhealthy monopoly.
I pay for YouTube TV and YouTube Premium as everyone else does, but I’m starting with the business tools. I’d rather pay Zoom than use Google Video. I stopped using Chrome.
Gmail is the hardest service to separate from because it’s also an identity service. I’m using it less and less until it’s only an identity service. I have >2k websites registered with my Gmail address, which could take years to clean up. I don’t need to pay for extra storage space, and I’m wondering if Google Docs is doing anything for me to pay for.
So, while it will be harder to stop using Google Products than it should be, the first step is admitting the problem and then working on it. Friends, we all have work to do.
