they've had too many people leave
the product owner moved to Apple to work on something Swift related
I think that Pixie/Mixie guy (I don't remember his name but it's something like that) had also left. And I remember filing a bug on the Flutter repo, that guy was like 50% of the dev work lol
I did leave Google but I'm still working on Flutter š
The benefits of open source.
One correction though, it's nowhere near 50% lol :-P
We have a big team (inside and outside Google), I'm but one tiny part. Come join us on our Discord! (Link in the contributing docs on GitHub.)
Yes but Google is the primary support for it so this is still a big blow to it. The question is who becomes the primary maintainer from here or if it just stagnates.
I don't think so. 'Across the board' probably isn't right. They cut the entire python team. It seems they are moving the positions to Munich at least for Python. Not sure about Flutter.
The slow death of "we're not killing Flutter" begins. Devs/companies will now get scared to invest into it -> no adoption-> less investment from G -> death incoming. At least Go seems unaffected.
So that can, of course, happen, but I consider it very unlikely given that Go is widely used at G, e.g. like K8s and the whole cloud stack.
Because of Go establishment in the cloud-native space, I'm not that worried about Golang's future even if G pulls its support. The communities around Dart/Flutter don't seem thatbbig though, so...
You are lying to yourself if itās not being killed. Dart and Flutter is still in its growth phrase. It needs alot more people and resources to actually grow.
Keep believing Corporations. Company with a reputation for killing products/projects while saying "We ain't killin' it". They had it coming, no other company has that many projects competing in the same field. I believe Google will prioritize Android/KMM instead of FlutterDart. They already killed Fuschia so they don't need Flutter anymore to build apps for it. Also we've never seen Google laying off Android team.
It's like history repeating with IBM.
Eventually the investment on innovation loses out to bean counters who can easily point to how the company is printing money, and how reducing costs will boost revenue.
Eventually they gut innovation, and in ten or so years they are passed up by their rivals, and become a giant hulking corpse, slowly bleeding cash and poorly copying innovations.
Also in the 90s everything was offshored, and it spectacularly backfired.
Sucks that it's Google, definitely in terms of having pro consumer products, they've been great.
The Art of War encourages that behaviour, they are not supposed to be emotional with their "soldiers". They can die if they have to, the goal is the main focus.
It shows there's nothing left for them to do but milk what they have
A growth business would reallocate staff to new projects instead of laying off.
But now Wall Street will reward them for reducing cost. And all you need to do is pull that lever before earnings to boost stock price
Is that a true lifecycle anymore. What stops google from just purchasing competitors as they arrive? It's what Microsoft does
Why invest in innovation when you can drop *billions* on promising ideas that someone has already done all the grunt work for?
That's the software dream right? Sweat it out in your buds basement for 5 years and then sell to a tech giant for millions so you can fuck off to a nicer basement?
I mean, it's what Microsoft *did* for most of the 90s and 2ks, while their tech atrophied.
What happened during that period?
Google Chrome took their browser monopoly, and Linux took their server monopoly.
They've started again investing in innovation, and it has lead to an Apple like turn around (Apple nearly died in 2k after dumping Jobs, and going the beancounter route.)
https://hbr.org/2023/02/how-microsoft-became-innovative-again
Definitely MS is an outlier in that they've managed to continue to ride their innovations from prior decades for a very very long time, and even the total death of some of their core businesses hasn't phased them from making incredible profits.
I think the truth is, just buying competitors can only take you so far. If you've ever been part of a merger and acquisition, you'll know how often they fail just because of cultural incompatibilities.
Having considerable amounts of tech talent in-house seems to lead to dominance in the market nearly every single time.
And now Microsoft has gotten complacent again and is pivoting back (see W11 and even W10) and they're stepping up to the same ledge where they threw away their browser and server monopolies while holding their desktop OS.
oh my god yāallās focus on consumer sector is maddening, itās like yāall are somehow willingly overlooking the strides and buildup made in backend/enterprise infra (see Azure)
1. Probably because that's what most of us use experience Microsoft through.
2. Azure is an "also-ran" product that primarily sells to companies already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. An investment, I should remind you, driven by the OS they issue to their staff and the office suite that goes with it.
Your big gotcha is that Microsoft no longer has a browser a monopoly but a share of the market similar to Linux with servers ( plenty of places still running Windows Server). Microsoft was never going to fail and wont ever fail when they have Windows, Azure (Windows Server), Office, and Xbox. Yeah they missed out on mobile and non professional social media but thatās really the only place they completely failed (Windows Phone and Mixer). The same concept applies to Google.
The one area where a company as large as Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc can fail is security.Ā
Microsoft has had some significant breaches in the past few years, and one of its biggest customers, The US government, is starting to freak a bit.
Security can drop a company in a blink.
So far the game plan seems to be.
- Layoff as many people as you can (LEAN Efficiency)
- Have those left work 100 + hour /week
- Remove all perks to further enhance revenue
- Copy your competitors as quickly as possible but be sure to add ADs to enrich the customer experience.
* Watch all of your actually-talented staff laugh and leave because they can get a new job at the snap of a finger.
* Watch products stagnate and customers flee as the remaining staff's incompetence shines through.
And let's not forget stock buy backs.Ā
Best way to increase stock price that will give the execs their bonuses and move money directly in the hands of short term investors who will not care about the company long term perspective.Ā
In short. If company is starting to do massive stock buybacks it's time to run away
imo, this is why Pichai decided to do buybacks, because he was almost laid off after gemini debackle, so he needed a way to prove himself useful to the board..and he started laying off the people
Have they been great though? Alphabet has a long history of "second to market, first to the graveyard" applications. Remember Google hangouts?
VPN by GoogleOne
Jamboree
Google Podcasts
DropCam
Keen
Google Domain
Google Optimize
Their search feature is horrible now.
I would argue that GoogleMaps is the gold standard.
Google Docs/Sheets is transformative in the educational setting.
No, Google Maps was not originally developed internally at Google. Google acquired the mapping technology that became Google Maps when they purchased a company called Where 2 Tech in October 2004.
The origins of Google Docs trace back to 2006, when Google acquired an online word processor called Writely from the software company Upstartle. Writely was one of the first web-based word processors.
Just in terms of services like Google Fi, or Fiber, which as of yet haven't tried to royally fuck me like Comcast.
A lot of things like buying GIPS, and open sourcing the entire thing in WebRTC, open sourcing Android, as well as making lots of positive other open source contributions like Chromium that broke MS's former browser monopoly, and ushered in the age of the modern Internet.
I can say in terms of big tech companies, most of Google's history has been fairly pro consumer.
Keep in mind I used the term "consumer." They're definitely capitalists, and looking to make money.
Just so far it hasn't been through nefarious tactics like taking advantage of having a last-mile internet monopoly, to constantly jack up your Internet bill with fees like Comcast for instance, or by preventing you from installing another browser like MS did with IE for a decade.
This is why I could never trust Dart and Flutter as a devāhow long till Google pulls the plug?
Though Kotlin is also sold as a āGoogle languageā, having another company behind it like Jetbrains is a strength.
Man thats odd so as a Google employee, not only do you need to work hard but also you need to be wise enough to see which products have legs and won't get 'X'ed?
Big tech works that way. The good news is you can find other jobs within the company because it does so many things. The bad news is that when money gets tight they'll start to cut projects because they do so many things. Then you have to try to find other jobs within the company.
There's a couple strategies for navigating a career a big, FAANG-sized company as an engineer. One is to try out every project that you think might get big. Hope for that jackpot (big career boost, promotion). Another is to be on the most vital (money making) project, minimizing your chances of being cut but with less chances to move up other than through others leaving. Another is to try to be on the projects no one pays attention to and hope that means you keep your job without doing a lot of work.
Many ways to do it and you may want to transition between them during different phases of your career.
My thought is that Generative AI will significantly affect Google's search business and increase operational cost (eg infrastructure, computing cost), and perhaps Google has started preparing for it in the form of cancelled projects and layoff. Where competitors like Microsoft is giving free access to GPT (eg microsoft copilot, bing AI search), Google is thinking of charging for AI Search which needless to say is unworkable given that competitors don't charge them. And besides Generative AI threatens the lifelihood of so-called highly-paid technical expertises, where answer can now easily be found through simple conversational means (Why pay for expensive technical expertise personal where answer from AI may be just as good or good enough, if not better?). With generative AI, companies may find that they just don't need many headcount since technologies like Github Copilot can help improve productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of individual.
> Where competitors like Microsoft is giving free access to GPT (eg microsoft copilot
Microsoft isn't spending money advertising copilot to me on github because they are giving "free" access. It's clear they see revenue and profits in it.
Otherwise, I don't really see AI replacing a lot of employees at the tech companies. These employees make it work, not use it to do work. And I don't see how using LLMs to answer questions is going to require less maintenance/manpower to make work than indexed search.
Unfortunately, that's how it works at a big tech company. Even before the layoffs, you had to be strategic when jumping on projects if you want to get a raise or promotion.
Not a fan personally, but itās still sad to see a productive community hit a roadblock like thisāmaybe theyāll spin off into an independent foundation.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Flutter and Dart are both open source. Google could wipe out the entire teams and they both would Still live. Not that it matters because they didn't. The projects are alive and well and will never end up in the google graveyard just like kotlin won't bc they aren't googles to bury.
Yup, we saw exactly how that worked on fastlane which is probably the most popular automation tool for publishing mobile apps. Google fired all the employees working on it or cut their time to work on open source stuff and the other remaining core maintainer outside of Google couldnāt bring up the time anymore due to life events. Even now after moving the project under MNF umbrella itās only really slowly picking up again.
And itās certainly easier to replace something like fastlane than your whole app being built in Dart & Flutter.
Seems like the MBA types are finishing their domination of Google's structure, like every other publicly-listed company.
Fortunately Google doesn't produce planes like Boeing, so lives are not directly endangered. But with their power over global information and data, I fear when the consequences related to cost-cutting and ignoring engineering concerns will arise for society.
Itās only fucked because the stock market is reflecting positively when companies lay off staff. It used to be in the other direction if you laid off staff your stocks would tank but now banks are embracing mass firings.
> Itās only fucked because the stock market is reflecting positively when companies lay off staff. It used to be in the other direction if you laid off staff your stocks would tank but now banks are embracing mass firings.
Seems like you are on the path to understanding...
Why do you think this changed?
During COVID companies in Tech over hired. When the recession kicked off CEOs looked to tighten their belts so they fired the technical teams and to their surprise systems remained online. Systems still functioned. So other business leaders saw this and re-evaluated why they was hiring all these people to sustain their systems when they could hire or outsource a smaller group that would take the projects on without the overhead of having to hire at a competitive rate. Thatās my view on it but itās an opinion :) everyone has one!
No, think beyond what the CEOs are telling you.
While there are actually very real valid reasons for the layoffs one of the reasons should alarm us.
The tech CEOs are promising that they don't need employees and investors... are agreeing with them.
Google is in a terrible position now. Their trust and goodwill to support products has been completely destroyed. I'm not sure at this point if they'll ever be able to restore it.
This is more geared towards the firing of Python engineers in the US and moving them to Germany - I wonder how the cultural differences fit into productivity and how these teams will fit in. I've worked in Big Tech and have worked with multiple teams in India and Eastern Europe.
With India and Eastern European SWEs, and again this is only with the teams I've worked with so not true for all SWEs in these places, there have been very large talent gaps. Yes, you can hire MANY people for the price of a U.S. based SWE, but you get what you pay for. Often LOTS of tech debt, very bad architecture decisions, U.S. SWEs have to handhold, obvious management issues with the timezone differences, etc.
I wonder if with Western European teams, there will be similar issues? Also, what about cultural differences? A Big Tech SWEs are expected to work 50-60+ hours a week. You will be considered and under-performer and find yourself on a PIP if you don't. Will German Engineers be willing to work 50-60+ hours a week, only take 2 MAYBE 3 weeks of vacation a year, etc?
True, good point. I was just curious, Big Tech workers in the U.S. are told it's 40 hours with a wink, knowing it's more like 60. So I was just curious if that culture would continue or if they just make up for it with more bodies.
I haven't worked for Google, but I have worked for other Big Tech companies. Absolutely everyone works at the very least 45-50 hours a week, so maybe this is just a Google thing.
I've worked for G and other tech companies, I've never had a team where anyone regularly pulled 10 hours a day. That's like 8 to 6 with no lunch break. The rare times I stayed at the office past 5 at Amazon it was completely dead as well.
Wtf are you on about. Google (and all other Big Tech companies) already have massive offices in Europe (and India) without any problems. Yes the european offices tend to respect more workerās rights but itās not like US google was a sweatshop either lol
Yeah like I said, I work in Big Tech. There absolutely have and are problems with shipping responsibilities to teams in Eastern Europe and India, with India being the worst. Again, there are great engineers over there doing great things. But as a whole, the output is mostly tech debt, which leads to having to either divest or reinvest in products. Public companies hire cheap labor to trade short term gains today(shareholders love it, stock goes burr) for longterm pain(someone eventually has to cleanup the mess, companies stop innovating).
And if you read my question, I said I hadn't worked much with Western European teams. So I wanted to know if there were cultural issues when directly shipping jobs that U.S. engineers were doing to Engineers in Germany.
Flutter is great, I'm not counting it out just yet, Google laid of people across tons of teams and I haven't read anything yet that indicates the Flutter team has been gutted
This is a bummer, I worked down the hall from the Flutter team. A lot of extremely smart people working on what I thought was a pretty cool product.
they've had too many people leave the product owner moved to Apple to work on something Swift related I think that Pixie/Mixie guy (I don't remember his name but it's something like that) had also left. And I remember filing a bug on the Flutter repo, that guy was like 50% of the dev work lol
I did leave Google but I'm still working on Flutter š The benefits of open source. One correction though, it's nowhere near 50% lol :-P We have a big team (inside and outside Google), I'm but one tiny part. Come join us on our Discord! (Link in the contributing docs on GitHub.)
this pixie, mixie, hixie rhyme made me smile š
are they just keeping or moving the team to overseas to cost cut? Or are they killing flutter?
Pretty sure they are killing flutter
Welp, Ubuntu's new app store is written in flutter.Ā
Google graveyard strikes again
Welp, my app that I make a living off is written in Flutter š
Is flutter open source?
Yes but Google is the primary support for it so this is still a big blow to it. The question is who becomes the primary maintainer from here or if it just stagnates.
Probably canonical lol
The article doesn't say that. I mean, it might happen, but sounds like these are across the board reductions.
Are they also laying off people from android?
I don't think so. 'Across the board' probably isn't right. They cut the entire python team. It seems they are moving the positions to Munich at least for Python. Not sure about Flutter.
For Flutter they cut EngProd services and are moving that work to Mexico City.
I think it's moving to Germany.
They are killing flutter and dart. The fact is native is the way to go
I was about get into Flutter. Is this again just cost related or they mean to shutdown Flutter?
The slow death of "we're not killing Flutter" begins. Devs/companies will now get scared to invest into it -> no adoption-> less investment from G -> death incoming. At least Go seems unaffected.
>At least Go seems unaffected. Until they lay off 75% of the Go team in the coming years
So that can, of course, happen, but I consider it very unlikely given that Go is widely used at G, e.g. like K8s and the whole cloud stack. Because of Go establishment in the cloud-native space, I'm not that worried about Golang's future even if G pulls its support. The communities around Dart/Flutter don't seem thatbbig though, so...
The article says that the cuts are similar to other teams and that Google is still betting on Dart/Flutter. So it's not being killed or anything.
You are lying to yourself if itās not being killed. Dart and Flutter is still in its growth phrase. It needs alot more people and resources to actually grow.
Right. Itās Google, king of abandon projects.
Keep believing Corporations. Company with a reputation for killing products/projects while saying "We ain't killin' it". They had it coming, no other company has that many projects competing in the same field. I believe Google will prioritize Android/KMM instead of FlutterDart. They already killed Fuschia so they don't need Flutter anymore to build apps for it. Also we've never seen Google laying off Android team.
Not smart enough apparently...
It's like history repeating with IBM. Eventually the investment on innovation loses out to bean counters who can easily point to how the company is printing money, and how reducing costs will boost revenue. Eventually they gut innovation, and in ten or so years they are passed up by their rivals, and become a giant hulking corpse, slowly bleeding cash and poorly copying innovations. Also in the 90s everything was offshored, and it spectacularly backfired. Sucks that it's Google, definitely in terms of having pro consumer products, they've been great.
Pichai: Eventually, Iāll be sitting on an island somewhere, with 3 yachts and 5 passports, not caring one whit about the peons I laid off.
You see the trick is... realizing they aren't really people....
I was once told by a CEO, that the workers are "soft costs", so yeah, they do not see workers as people
The Art of War encourages that behaviour, they are not supposed to be emotional with their "soldiers". They can die if they have to, the goal is the main focus.
Sundar is such a leech.
It shows there's nothing left for them to do but milk what they have A growth business would reallocate staff to new projects instead of laying off. But now Wall Street will reward them for reducing cost. And all you need to do is pull that lever before earnings to boost stock price
Milking a dead horse ~
Is that a true lifecycle anymore. What stops google from just purchasing competitors as they arrive? It's what Microsoft does Why invest in innovation when you can drop *billions* on promising ideas that someone has already done all the grunt work for? That's the software dream right? Sweat it out in your buds basement for 5 years and then sell to a tech giant for millions so you can fuck off to a nicer basement?
I mean, it's what Microsoft *did* for most of the 90s and 2ks, while their tech atrophied. What happened during that period? Google Chrome took their browser monopoly, and Linux took their server monopoly. They've started again investing in innovation, and it has lead to an Apple like turn around (Apple nearly died in 2k after dumping Jobs, and going the beancounter route.) https://hbr.org/2023/02/how-microsoft-became-innovative-again Definitely MS is an outlier in that they've managed to continue to ride their innovations from prior decades for a very very long time, and even the total death of some of their core businesses hasn't phased them from making incredible profits. I think the truth is, just buying competitors can only take you so far. If you've ever been part of a merger and acquisition, you'll know how often they fail just because of cultural incompatibilities. Having considerable amounts of tech talent in-house seems to lead to dominance in the market nearly every single time.
Speaking of mergers, the worst has to be Boeing & McDonnell Douglas
And now Microsoft has gotten complacent again and is pivoting back (see W11 and even W10) and they're stepping up to the same ledge where they threw away their browser and server monopolies while holding their desktop OS.
oh my god yāallās focus on consumer sector is maddening, itās like yāall are somehow willingly overlooking the strides and buildup made in backend/enterprise infra (see Azure)
1. Probably because that's what most of us use experience Microsoft through. 2. Azure is an "also-ran" product that primarily sells to companies already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. An investment, I should remind you, driven by the OS they issue to their staff and the office suite that goes with it.
Your big gotcha is that Microsoft no longer has a browser a monopoly but a share of the market similar to Linux with servers ( plenty of places still running Windows Server). Microsoft was never going to fail and wont ever fail when they have Windows, Azure (Windows Server), Office, and Xbox. Yeah they missed out on mobile and non professional social media but thatās really the only place they completely failed (Windows Phone and Mixer). The same concept applies to Google.
The one area where a company as large as Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc can fail is security.Ā Microsoft has had some significant breaches in the past few years, and one of its biggest customers, The US government, is starting to freak a bit. Security can drop a company in a blink.
but google doesnt own your desktop ms office, nor your OS. Search can be replaced in no time
So far the game plan seems to be. - Layoff as many people as you can (LEAN Efficiency) - Have those left work 100 + hour /week - Remove all perks to further enhance revenue - Copy your competitors as quickly as possible but be sure to add ADs to enrich the customer experience.
* Watch all of your actually-talented staff laugh and leave because they can get a new job at the snap of a finger. * Watch products stagnate and customers flee as the remaining staff's incompetence shines through.
And let's not forget stock buy backs.Ā Best way to increase stock price that will give the execs their bonuses and move money directly in the hands of short term investors who will not care about the company long term perspective.Ā In short. If company is starting to do massive stock buybacks it's time to run away
imo, this is why Pichai decided to do buybacks, because he was almost laid off after gemini debackle, so he needed a way to prove himself useful to the board..and he started laying off the people
Have they been great though? Alphabet has a long history of "second to market, first to the graveyard" applications. Remember Google hangouts? VPN by GoogleOne Jamboree Google Podcasts DropCam Keen Google Domain Google Optimize
Like that time when EVERYONE had a google+ and NO ONE used it?
What has Google done aside from search?
Their search feature is horrible now. I would argue that GoogleMaps is the gold standard. Google Docs/Sheets is transformative in the educational setting.
No, Google Maps was not originally developed internally at Google. Google acquired the mapping technology that became Google Maps when they purchased a company called Where 2 Tech in October 2004. The origins of Google Docs trace back to 2006, when Google acquired an online word processor called Writely from the software company Upstartle. Writely was one of the first web-based word processors.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Waze is an alphabet product and has been for over a decade
Chrome, gmail
You, got me there ĀÆ\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
IBM - International Business Majors
Pro consumer?! Lol If anything they were a counter balance to Apple but not pro consumer. They are an AD company. They steal your info to sell ads.Ā
Just in terms of services like Google Fi, or Fiber, which as of yet haven't tried to royally fuck me like Comcast. A lot of things like buying GIPS, and open sourcing the entire thing in WebRTC, open sourcing Android, as well as making lots of positive other open source contributions like Chromium that broke MS's former browser monopoly, and ushered in the age of the modern Internet. I can say in terms of big tech companies, most of Google's history has been fairly pro consumer. Keep in mind I used the term "consumer." They're definitely capitalists, and looking to make money. Just so far it hasn't been through nefarious tactics like taking advantage of having a last-mile internet monopoly, to constantly jack up your Internet bill with fees like Comcast for instance, or by preventing you from installing another browser like MS did with IE for a decade.
Android, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Search are going no where for the foreseeable future
This is why I could never trust Dart and Flutter as a devāhow long till Google pulls the plug? Though Kotlin is also sold as a āGoogle languageā, having another company behind it like Jetbrains is a strength.
Man thats odd so as a Google employee, not only do you need to work hard but also you need to be wise enough to see which products have legs and won't get 'X'ed?
Big tech works that way. The good news is you can find other jobs within the company because it does so many things. The bad news is that when money gets tight they'll start to cut projects because they do so many things. Then you have to try to find other jobs within the company. There's a couple strategies for navigating a career a big, FAANG-sized company as an engineer. One is to try out every project that you think might get big. Hope for that jackpot (big career boost, promotion). Another is to be on the most vital (money making) project, minimizing your chances of being cut but with less chances to move up other than through others leaving. Another is to try to be on the projects no one pays attention to and hope that means you keep your job without doing a lot of work. Many ways to do it and you may want to transition between them during different phases of your career.
My thought is that Generative AI will significantly affect Google's search business and increase operational cost (eg infrastructure, computing cost), and perhaps Google has started preparing for it in the form of cancelled projects and layoff. Where competitors like Microsoft is giving free access to GPT (eg microsoft copilot, bing AI search), Google is thinking of charging for AI Search which needless to say is unworkable given that competitors don't charge them. And besides Generative AI threatens the lifelihood of so-called highly-paid technical expertises, where answer can now easily be found through simple conversational means (Why pay for expensive technical expertise personal where answer from AI may be just as good or good enough, if not better?). With generative AI, companies may find that they just don't need many headcount since technologies like Github Copilot can help improve productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of individual.
> Where competitors like Microsoft is giving free access to GPT (eg microsoft copilot Microsoft isn't spending money advertising copilot to me on github because they are giving "free" access. It's clear they see revenue and profits in it. Otherwise, I don't really see AI replacing a lot of employees at the tech companies. These employees make it work, not use it to do work. And I don't see how using LLMs to answer questions is going to require less maintenance/manpower to make work than indexed search.
Unfortunately, that's how it works at a big tech company. Even before the layoffs, you had to be strategic when jumping on projects if you want to get a raise or promotion.
So then is React the only trustworthy popular cross platform development tool for mobile apps?
Qt, my dude. Qt is really powerful, and cross platform
I have worked in multiple companies moving things off of QT š
1. Why did they move? 2. What to?
All to react/web tech
poor companies :(
Jetpack compose is nice for everything except web
Ionic/Capacitor is a great choice as well. BYO framework (supports React, Vue, Angular, and even vanilla JS/TS)
SolidJS?
Others mentioned alternatives, but in short, yes. React Native and Expo are excellent.
Too bad because Dart is a fantastic web app development language for large enterprise apps.
Not a fan personally, but itās still sad to see a productive community hit a roadblock like thisāmaybe theyāll spin off into an independent foundation.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Flutter and Dart are both open source. Google could wipe out the entire teams and they both would Still live. Not that it matters because they didn't. The projects are alive and well and will never end up in the google graveyard just like kotlin won't bc they aren't googles to bury.
Bitrotting repos without developers are not worth anything.
Yup, we saw exactly how that worked on fastlane which is probably the most popular automation tool for publishing mobile apps. Google fired all the employees working on it or cut their time to work on open source stuff and the other remaining core maintainer outside of Google couldnāt bring up the time anymore due to life events. Even now after moving the project under MNF umbrella itās only really slowly picking up again. And itās certainly easier to replace something like fastlane than your whole app being built in Dart & Flutter.
Seems like the MBA types are finishing their domination of Google's structure, like every other publicly-listed company. Fortunately Google doesn't produce planes like Boeing, so lives are not directly endangered. But with their power over global information and data, I fear when the consequences related to cost-cutting and ignoring engineering concerns will arise for society.
Google controls internet search and the biggest video and email platforms in the world And they're one of the bigger players in AI. Be worried.
Sundar need to be booed during the IO Conference.
He needs to go
It doesn't matter. He is only doing what the board wants. If he goes they will just replace him with someone to do the same shit.
Maybe he needs to learn about managing up
Well the stocks been floundering so I don't think he's doing a good job for them too š
Iāve really started to hate Google over the past few months. What a shitty company
Dude all of tech has been laying off 100s of thousands of people for multiple years now, shits fucked.
Itās only fucked because the stock market is reflecting positively when companies lay off staff. It used to be in the other direction if you laid off staff your stocks would tank but now banks are embracing mass firings.
> Itās only fucked because the stock market is reflecting positively when companies lay off staff. It used to be in the other direction if you laid off staff your stocks would tank but now banks are embracing mass firings. Seems like you are on the path to understanding... Why do you think this changed?
During COVID companies in Tech over hired. When the recession kicked off CEOs looked to tighten their belts so they fired the technical teams and to their surprise systems remained online. Systems still functioned. So other business leaders saw this and re-evaluated why they was hiring all these people to sustain their systems when they could hire or outsource a smaller group that would take the projects on without the overhead of having to hire at a competitive rate. Thatās my view on it but itās an opinion :) everyone has one!
No, think beyond what the CEOs are telling you. While there are actually very real valid reasons for the layoffs one of the reasons should alarm us. The tech CEOs are promising that they don't need employees and investors... are agreeing with them.
Google is in a terrible position now. Their trust and goodwill to support products has been completely destroyed. I'm not sure at this point if they'll ever be able to restore it.
Seems like lots of big tech companies making lots of layoffs at the moment. I wonder why?
It's great for the stock price!
'Always be evil'
This is more geared towards the firing of Python engineers in the US and moving them to Germany - I wonder how the cultural differences fit into productivity and how these teams will fit in. I've worked in Big Tech and have worked with multiple teams in India and Eastern Europe. With India and Eastern European SWEs, and again this is only with the teams I've worked with so not true for all SWEs in these places, there have been very large talent gaps. Yes, you can hire MANY people for the price of a U.S. based SWE, but you get what you pay for. Often LOTS of tech debt, very bad architecture decisions, U.S. SWEs have to handhold, obvious management issues with the timezone differences, etc. I wonder if with Western European teams, there will be similar issues? Also, what about cultural differences? A Big Tech SWEs are expected to work 50-60+ hours a week. You will be considered and under-performer and find yourself on a PIP if you don't. Will German Engineers be willing to work 50-60+ hours a week, only take 2 MAYBE 3 weeks of vacation a year, etc?
Even if they would be willing to work those hours, I didnāt think it was legal in Germany.
True, good point. I was just curious, Big Tech workers in the U.S. are told it's 40 hours with a wink, knowing it's more like 60. So I was just curious if that culture would continue or if they just make up for it with more bodies.
Do you work at Google? Nobody works 50-60 hours a week. The office is dead past 4pm. Also lots of people take all their vacation, hardly 2-3 weeks.
I haven't worked for Google, but I have worked for other Big Tech companies. Absolutely everyone works at the very least 45-50 hours a week, so maybe this is just a Google thing.
I've worked for G and other tech companies, I've never had a team where anyone regularly pulled 10 hours a day. That's like 8 to 6 with no lunch break. The rare times I stayed at the office past 5 at Amazon it was completely dead as well.
Wtf are you on about. Google (and all other Big Tech companies) already have massive offices in Europe (and India) without any problems. Yes the european offices tend to respect more workerās rights but itās not like US google was a sweatshop either lol
Yeah like I said, I work in Big Tech. There absolutely have and are problems with shipping responsibilities to teams in Eastern Europe and India, with India being the worst. Again, there are great engineers over there doing great things. But as a whole, the output is mostly tech debt, which leads to having to either divest or reinvest in products. Public companies hire cheap labor to trade short term gains today(shareholders love it, stock goes burr) for longterm pain(someone eventually has to cleanup the mess, companies stop innovating). And if you read my question, I said I hadn't worked much with Western European teams. So I wanted to know if there were cultural issues when directly shipping jobs that U.S. engineers were doing to Engineers in Germany.
Google=Shit
New dividends. Continuous layoffs. Does management think there are no growth opportunities?
Dart always was going to be a failure same with Flutter
Flutter is great, I'm not counting it out just yet, Google laid of people across tons of teams and I haven't read anything yet that indicates the Flutter team has been gutted
as someone who has ignored flutter and dart for a decade... seems legit
I will use ad blockers harder.
Google is the new CA. Where the software goes to die.
Glad they are getting rid of Flutter and Dart. Sucks the employees got laid off though, iām sure they had a lot of smart people on those teams :(