Google lays off Python team – reports

Several online news outlets report that Google laid off its entire Python language team. However, Google denied that the layoffs were company-wide when asked about the fate of the team.

Reports of the Python team’s dismissal have shown up in Reddit, Hacker News, and social.coop. “Google’s Python team was a small team, most of which were also on the Python steering council or core Python developers,” one commenter said in Hacker News. “These people had decades of experience in Python. Their knowledge and community connections [are] irreplaceable.”

Python has become an increasingly popular programming language in recent years, with AI becoming a particularly critical usage.

Google said the action taken was not a company-wide layoff, in response to an InfoWorld inquiry April 29. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead. 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,” a Google spokesperson said. “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.”

The Google spokesperson emphasized that this was not a company-wide layoff. Re-organizations are part of the normal course of business and these decisions are made at the team level, the spokesperson said. Impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles at Google.

Meanwhile the company continues to invest in developer products. Updates to the Flutter UI toolkit will be announced at the Google I/O conference in two weeks, Google said.