Lately, employees at tech giant company Google are asking the leadership several questions about the criteria for layoffs.
Following the massive layoffs ongoing at the company, reports disclose that some employees who are still at the company are surprised to see several of the company’s “potential” workers laid off.
It is interesting to note that some laid-off employees had either been long-tenured or recently promoted, which has raised questions among employees still present at the company about the criteria used to determine who remains at the company.
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These employees are already bracing up for the company’s next action after the CEO Sundar Pichai via an email disclosed that there will be “bumps in the road” as the firm moves forward with layoffs.
A report by news outlets disclosed that Google has provided a FAQ concerning the ongoing layoffs, however, employees are not satisfied with it over concerns that it didn’t provide much info on so many answers.
This has therefore spurred them to flood Dory, the company’s question-asking platform, as well setting up virtual communities to figure out who’s been laid off and why.
Some employees came together on their own, organizing ad hoc groups to try and get answers. These employees also created a Google doc spreadsheet as a way to keep track of people who were laid off and which part of the business they worked in.
Meanwhile, Directors at Google have urged concerned employees to hold their questions for the town hall taking place next week.
Recall that Google’s parent company Alphabet recently cut about 12,000 jobs, which affected various sections such as the recruiting and corporate functions, as well as some engineering and product teams.
The company has already sent a separate email to employees in the U.S. who are affected while noting that in other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and protection.
Just recently, after its 12,000 job cuts at Alphabet, reports disclose that Google’s Area 120 team has been winded down, also shuttering tons of projects.
Area 120 is Google’s in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% of project product ideas. It is responsible for products such as Stack, Checks, Tables, and threadbite. It has also helped develop Google news, Adsense, Gmail, and Google cardboard.
So far in the U.S., employees have been laid off across business units including Chrome, Cloud, and its experimental Area 120 unit. Some employees working on the company’s artificial intelligence programs were also laid off,
In an open letter by the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, he disclosed that over the past two years, the company has witnessed a dramatic growth, hence, to match and fuel that growth, they hired for a different economic reality than it is facing today. He further disclosed that the roles being eliminated at the company reflect the outcome of its review.
Google has significantly slashed a major part of its workforce as it seeks to navigate the global economic downturn. The company isn’t the only Tech firm that has laid off workers, other tech companies such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have also laid off a significant amount of their workforce.