Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch
Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch
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.
They are not stupid at all. Their interests are in conflict with the interests of tech workers and they are winning effortlessly, over and over again.
The big tech companies are all owned by the same people. If these layoffs cause google to lose market share to another company, it's fine because they own that company too.
What matters is coordinating regular layoffs across the whole industry to reduce labour costs. It's the same principle as a strike: if the whole industry does layoffs, workers gradually have to accept lower salaries. In other words, the employers are unionised and the employees are not.
This process will probably continue for the next 20 years, until tech workers have low salaries and no job security. It has happened to countless industries before, and I doubt we are special.
I'm sure the next big industries will be technology-focused, but that's not the same as "tech". They won't involve people being paid $200k to write websites in ruby.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers”
There was this incredible management consultant in france in the 18th century. Name eludes me, but if he was still around Google could hire him and start finding some far more convincing efficiencies.
The guy was especially good at aligning resources to remove layers
I spent thr last 10 minutes reading the flutter docs, and I have no fucking idea what it is, what language it is written in, or generally anything useful about it. I think we'll be fine.
Also, Google's contributions to Python are mostly obsolete. optparse was replaced by argparse which is .mostly replaced by click. Yapf was never successful and black has taken a commanding lead. Python will be just fine.
If you couldn't figure out what flutter is in 10 minutes that reflects poorly on you much more than anything else.
Flutter is a UX/UI framework for Dart programming language. Dart is a statically typed (optionally dynamic possible), completely type safe, soundly null-safe compiled programming language. It can compile to JS to run on the web, or compile to x86_64 or Arm assembly to run on hardware.
Combining Dart, which is honestly an awesome but underrated language with Flutter which is a declarative UI framework, I have found a new love for app development. It's very pleasant.
And now I get shot in the dick with this news....
Flutter uses dart. It's one of the best ui building frameworks I have used. Not that it is perfect...
Flutter - the framework - is great. Dart as a language is tolerable - lot of ugly boilerplate, manual codegen, and things you can't quite express correctly are everywhere, but if you're not too much of a stickler, Flutter is still worth it (at least until Compose Multiplatform matures - if ever).
I just hate reading it. I wish it looked more like Kotlin and less like JavaScript 😭
I typed in "python flutter" into Google and clicked on the first link. The first pictures shows a bit of code and a simple window with two buttons. I go back to the code and skim it. It defines the buttons. How you cannot deduce from that, that this library makes UI says a lot about you.
I also think your assumption that click replaced argparse is wrong. Click heavily relies on decorators which makes separation of functional code and command line interface code either impossible or difficult. If you only care about your one program that is fine, but it does make your code not very reusable.
Flutter has nothing to do with Python as it's a JavaScript library, so if looks like we're in the same boat.
I am a manager at a big tech and I hate capitalism. CXOs really only care about profits, and thus everybody high-level proposes new enshittification strategies.
Can't really make heads of tails of this. I thought they were really into AI and Python is a big part of that. Which other languages are they going to invest in? Rust for Chromium?
Python is in essence the interface for AI tools that are optimized with languages that are easier to get high performance results with.
They hired cheaper talent from elsewhere for python.
Looks like my Lemmy-client of choice did some retrying when I had poor connection, sorry about that.
I think trying to go cheap on native apps was always kind of a fool's errand, tbh. Cordova, Xamarin, React Native and so on - all pretty sub-par solutions leading to poor experience without actually materializing the desired savings.
Anecdotally I mostly hear that the cross-platform code doesn't work so you end up needing to write platform specific implementations of everything anyway. But in Flutter. And it is harder to hire good talent for.
What idiot applies for a job at Google?
Someone who wants to have Google on their CV when they leave in 2 years. Generally works out.
Aren't a lot of Android apps made with Flutter?
Yes
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert.
“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.
Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.
Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people.
WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs.
The original article contains 700 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
FUCK
Google why do you do me like this
Disinvestment into Python, Flutter, and Dart is a clear signal that those tools are unimportant to Google. I won't be recommending that anyone use Dart or Flutter on new projects.
You shouldn't have ever been recommending dart or flutter.
Python ain't going anywhere tho
Why not?
Python is going to die eventually. It's too slow and the infrastructure is too painful for it to survive super long term.
It's ridiculous popular now though so it's going to take decades to die down.
Has anyone used Dart the past decade?
Aside from everyone who's using flutter?
I sorta forgot it existed.
You seem to think Google cares at all. Android has been languishing and Flutter is lightyears ahead. KMP is junk compared to what Flutter has accomplished with a fraction of the bells and whistles.
Odd conclusion to draw. I'm simply not inclined to recommend tools that are not going to be supported by the organization that created them. Development ecosystems are important when planning a project.
I'm not sure how cononical is connected to this.
Sass won't be too happy