SAN FRANCISCO: Upon his return from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, office one day in October, Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker found that his work badge could not open a turnstile, indicating that he had been laid off.
Hirsh Theriault discovered that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost their jobs. More than 40 people in the news division were cut, a union at the company reported, though some were later offered positions in other areas within Google.
There has been a rise in such experiences at Google, where ongoing job cuts in recent months, following a year of significant layoffs, have left employees on edge.
The layoffs have led to delays in projects and caused employees to spend working hours attempting to learn which work groups have been affected and who might be next, according to 10 current and former Google employees.
Diane Hirsh Theriault, a software engineer for Google News, at her home in Waltham, Massachusetts, on Jan 31, 2024. She wrote in a post on LinkedIn that ‘the buildings are half empty at 4.30’. — The New York Times
Furthermore, the layoffs have changed the narrative that long defined working at Google; the perception that it was more of a tinkers’ community than a typical office environment, where creativity and thinking outside the box were encouraged. That it was a fun, unique place to work.
CEO Sundar Pichai announced over a year ago that the company would reduce its workforce by 12,000 jobs, or 6%, as part of a difficult decision intended to prepare for the future.
These cuts have continued into this year as Pichai predicted they would be much smaller, rolling layoffs throughout the year. Since early January, over 1,000 jobs have been eliminated, affecting the ad sales division, YouTube, and employees working on the company’s voice-operated assistant.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has stated that it is trying to reduce costs to fund its growing investment in artificial intelligence. Google is also trying to streamline its bureaucracy so that employees can focus on the company’s most important priorities, according to Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini.
“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices,” Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Jan 17. For some divisions, “this means reorganising and, in some cases, eliminating roles.” Teams could still cut additional roles throughout the year, he added.
Employees claim that the atmosphere at work has become somber. While Google has ramped up efforts to develop AI products and keep up with competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI, some of the human employees feel less significant.
The Google offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were hit by layoffs last year, on Jan 31, 2024. Job cuts, which could continue throughout the year, have created a glum mood at what was arguably Silicon Valley’s most exuberant workplace. — The New York Times
“The buildings are half empty at 4.30,” Hirsh Theriault wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That’s gone.”
Google’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies such as Meta. As a percentage of the company’s total workforce, they are far smaller than recent cuts at companies like Xerox and Twitch. Google’s full-time workforce was 182,502 at the end of 2023, just 4% smaller than at the end of 2022. The company reported a US$20.7bil (RM99.06bil) profit in the last quarter of 2023, a 52% increase from a year earlier.
However, Google’s job cuts have been accompanied by broader changes in how the company is operated, including reshuffling work groups and removing management layers. Workers complain that reorganisation has been chaotically carried out and poorly communicated.
When YouTube laid off one of its vendor manager teams, the company did not notify other groups that rely on the team, though some workers were offered the chance to get their jobs back.
Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google before he was laid off last summer, outside the company’s offices in Zurich on Feb 2, 2024. ‘The thing that took you to Google was passion,’ he says. — The New York Times
When layoffs resumed in January, a Google worker in Switzerland started an internal document for employees to track the job cuts since the company has said little to them about where it is making the cuts. The document has become an essential source of information, employees said, along with news reports, social media and the old-fashioned office rumour mill.
“From an HR standpoint, this is a nightmare,” said Meghan M. Biro, whose firm, TalentCulture, creates content about best practices in human resources. “It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer.”
Google said leaders had communicated clearly to teams when they were undergoing changes.
Workers warned in interviews that some of the cuts could prove disruptive to parts of the business already struggling to complete thorny tasks. In January, Google cut hundreds of employees from its core engineering organisation.
The Google logo is reflected in the window of a restaurant across the street from the company’s Manhattan offices on Jan 30, 2024. Google’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies but the cuts have accompanied broader changes in how the company operates. — The New York Times
One of the core division’s main priorities is helping Google comply with the European Digital Markets Act when the law goes into effect on March 6. The law will make tech giants show consumers their choices for online services and force them to get consent to share user data within the company.
But employees working on the task fear that the company is behind schedule and that it could be difficult for Google to be in full compliance by the deadline, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Google said it had already started rolling out consent screens to European users in January and expected to introduce more changes before the deadline. The recent job reductions in its core division would not affect the timing, the company added.
Google employees were previously encouraged to work on experimental projects, but over the last year doing something experimental has proved to be risky, according to four workers who spoke anonymously. The company has essentially shut down Area 120, its in-house incubator, and altered the strategy of X, a “moonshot factory” that tried to build new companies.
Google said employees were constantly doing “extraordinarily innovative, ambitious things across the company”.
Employees are more reluctant to ask for the so-called 20%, or side, projects, which used to be a way to explore an idea outside of their regular work that they found compelling, five people said. That was a regrettable shift for Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google, mostly in Zurich, working on products such as Google Street View in Maps.
“The thing that took you to Google was passion,” said Breheny, who was laid off last summer. “You could have fun making stuff. It stayed like that for a long time.” – The New York Times
