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Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ (www.hindustantimes.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (9 children)

Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending

I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops "trending". I don't even know what that's supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.

But also you're not just supporting the language. You're supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.

Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.

Also, the story of Boeing's planes-that-don't-fly-good. Decades of engineering out the door to save money in a single quarter means accumulating tail risk that you - a manager who will be up or out in another five years - never have to deal with.

This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing

Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That's the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm's bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Python is great for what it is, but the best language developed in your lifetime? Its type system is janky and bolted on. A good type system is one of the main things I look for to call a programming language great.