this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Laying people off instead of offering to move them to the now-more-important projects has to be one of the dumbest management moves that tech companies repeatedly do. These are people already trained on all the policies and procedures and tooling and "culture" specific to your company.
It's going to be more expensive to hire and train new people when the dumdums in upper management finally figure out the mistakes they made that got them to a point where they decided they need to cut jobs and projects, and the ramp-up time before you actually start seeing progress on those priorities is going to be seriously lengthened. Of course they won't acknowledge it was their fault in the first place, and again the heads roll on the wrong end of the corporate ladder.
If I'm reading their CEOspeak right, their objective is to fire the very experienced people, that costs a lot of money, and replace them with people that costs less.
I never worked at Google, so I don't know for sure, but it sounds like the Python team is important and that this will backfire. As the people that costs less will also be less skilled, and Python is an important piece for AI/ML research, where Google is already lagging behind. The AI people in Google will get lower quality help with Python, and Google will lag even further behind.
That what happens when the CEO is an MBA and not an engineer.
Engineers over index in their own ways, but I think you're spot on with decoding the PR speak.
The Python team was very involved with the Python Software Foundation and was influencial with directing priorities for the Python programming language reference implementation (which is by far the most widely used implementation of Python). Google just gave up their say in how the language will evolve. Seems like an incredibly bad strategy. But then again, Google has been, from a financial perspective, nothing more than a digital classified ads platform for decades. If a smart MBA were running Google they'd start spinning off divisions into new IPOs and cashing in with dividends like other large conglomerates have done in the past when they have stopped inovating or actually commit to their projects long term.
Maybe we just need CEOs to be more receptive to developers' wishes.