Amid media reports that Alphabet-owned Google has laid off its entire Python team in a bid to cut costs by hiring cheap labour outside the United States, a social media post by a former Google engineer who was recently shown the door has gone viral on social media.
Google has laid off several of its employees in the past few weeks. A new report by Free Press Journal revealed that the Sundar Pichai-led company has now fired its entire Python team for ‘cheap’ labour. As per the report, Google plans to hire cheaper labour outside the United States to reduce costs for the company.
As per a post by Social.coop on Mastodon (via Hacker News), a former Google Python team member stated that he is deeply saddened by the decision and called it “by far the best job” in his 20-year career. Another Google worker wrote, “It’s a tough day when everyone you work with directly, including your manager, is laid off — excuse me, ‘had their roles reduced’, and you’re asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it. (It’s almost like capitalism isn’t actually good and you shouldn’t want to live in the US.)”
The US Python team reportedly had less than ten members and managed most parts of Google’s Python ecosystem, stability of Python at Google, updated with thousands of third-party packages and developed a type-checker. This comes after it was reported that Google cut staff from the real estate and finance departments as well.
About Google
Google is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI).It has been referred to as “the most powerful company in the world” and is one of the world’s most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.
