Google's once happy offices are feeling the chill of layoffs

When Diane Hirsh Theriault's colleague returned from lunch to Google's Cambridge, Massachusetts, office one afternoon in October, his work badge failed to open a turnstile. He quickly realized that this was a sign that he had been fired.

Ms. Hirsh Theriault soon 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 company union said, although some of them were later offered jobs elsewhere within Google.

Ms. Hirsh Theriault's experience is increasingly common at Google, where job cuts in recent months after a year of significant layoffs have put employees on edge. The layoffs have delayed projects and prompted employees to spend work hours figuring out which work groups have been affected and who might be next, said 10 current and former Google employees, including some who requested anonymity so they could be candid about their jobs speak. .

Furthermore, the layoffs have changed the narrative that long defined working at Google; that it was more of a crafting community than an everyday office, where creativity and out-of-the-box thinking were encouraged. That it was a fun, different workplace.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than a year ago that the company would cut 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce. describes it as “a difficult decision to prepare us for the future.”

These cuts have trickled down this year into what Mr. Pichai said could be many smaller, rolling layoffs throughout the year. Since early January, the company has cut more than 1,000 jobs, impacting its ad sales department, YouTube and employees who work on the company's voice-activated assistant.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has said it is trying to cut costs to pay for growing investments in artificial intelligence. And Google is trying to cut layers of bureaucracy so employees can focus on the biggest business priorities, said Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokeswoman. The company added that it was not implementing company-wide layoffs and that reorganizations were part of normal business.

“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we must make difficult choices,” Mr. Pichai wrote in a Jan. 17 letter to employees. For some divisions, “this means reorganizing and, in some cases, eliminating roles.” Teams can still cut additional roles throughout the year, he added.

Employees say the mood in the workplace has become somber. As Google has gone into overdrive to develop artificial intelligence products and keep pace with competitors like Microsoft and the startup OpenAI, some people building the company's technology are feeling less important.

Now “the buildings are half empty at 4:30 p.m.,” Ms. Hirsh Theriault wrote in one LinkedIn message. “I know many people, including myself, who used to like to work extra evenings and weekends to finish the demo or just out of boredom. That's gone.”

Google's layoffs are smaller than those at some other big tech companies like Meta. And as a percentage of the company's total workforce, they are much smaller than recent cuts at companies like Xerox and the livestreaming platform Twitch. Google's full-time workforce stood at 182,502 at the end of 2023, down just 4 percent from the end of 2022. On Tuesday, the company said it posted a profit of $20.7 billion in the final quarter of 2023, up 52 percent year-over-year earlier. earlier.

But Google's job cuts were accompanied by broader changes in the way the company operated, as it reshuffled work groups and removed layers of management. Employees complain that the reorganization was carried out chaotically and that there was poor communication.

When YouTube laid off one of its vendor manager teams, responsible for approving purchase orders so that companies get paid for content moderation, the company did not notify other groups that rely on the team, one person said, although some of the employees were offered the chance to get their job back.

When layoffs resumed in January, a Google employee in Switzerland started an internal document that allowed employees to track job losses, as the company had said little to them about where it was making the cuts. According to employees, the document has become an essential source of information, along with news reports, social media and the old-fashioned office rumor mill.

“From an HR perspective, this is a nightmare,” said Meghan M. Biro, whose company TalentCulture creates content on human resources best practices. “It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer.”

Google said leaders have clearly communicated to teams when they are undergoing changes.

Employees warned in interviews that some of the cuts could be disruptive to parts of the company already struggling to handle thorny tasks. In January, Google laid off hundreds of employees from its core engineering organization, which was responsible for the infrastructure and tools used across the company.

One of the main priorities of the core division is Help Google comply with the European Digital Markets Act, when the law comes into force on March 6. The law will ensure that tech giants show consumers their choices for online services, such as web browsers, and force them to consent to sharing user data within the company. But employees working on the effort fear the company is behind schedule and that it could be difficult for Google to fully comply with the deadline, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Google said it had already started rolling out consent screens for European users in January and expected to roll out more changes before the deadline. It added that recent job cuts in the core division would not affect the timing.

Google employees have long been encouraged to work on experimental projects. But doing anything experimental has proven risky over the past year, said four employees who spoke on condition of anonymity. The company is virtually closed Area 120the internal incubator that sought to develop new products and services, and changed the strategy of X, a so-called 'moonshot factory' that tried to build new companies.

Google said employees were constantly doing “extremely innovative, ambitious things across the company.”

Employees are more reluctant to ask for so-called 20 percent or side projects, which used to be a way to explore an idea outside their regular work that they found appealing, five people said. That was an unfortunate shift for Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google, mostly in Zurich, where he worked on products like Google Street View in Maps.

“What brought you to Google was passion,” said Mr. Breheny, who was fired last summer. “You can have fun making things. It remained that way for a long time.”