Google’s latest layoffs are just the beginning

“Thank you, our corporate overlords, for our new annual tradition.”

If you had taken a peek last week at Memegen, Google’s irreverent internal meme board for employees, you’d have seen that quote with thousands of upvotes. Even during a particularly nasty week of tech layoffs, Google led the way by suddenly cutting over 1,000 people with barely any explanation.

Since 12,000 people were axed a year ago, smaller layoffs have continued to roll through the sprawling conglomerate at a steady clip, creating a feeling of unease. Not all of these prior cuts have been covered publically, such as a roughly 10 percent downsizing of the public policy group in mid November.

This latest wave of layoffs felt “extremely impersonal,” as one impacted engineering director with 18 years of employment under his belt wrote in a note to colleagues. Still, many saw them coming. “Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall,” the engineering director wrote in his note, a copy of which was shared with me. “The conflict between ‘uncomfortable culture’ and ‘golden handcuffs’ was becoming intolerable.”

CEO Sundar Pichai has yet to address the layoffs internally. Information about them has been intentionally siloed team by team, with memos from leads saying they are about “flattening our organization,” making “faster decisions,” and increasing “efficiency.” Team-specific town halls are expected to shed more light in the coming days. For now, the bigger picture is blurry.

“Everyone at Google understands that these [cuts] are coming from the top,” one veteran manager told me. “There’s no way this was the decision of a few disconnected orgs in isolation.”

While most of the teams that were hit have been reported already, others haven’t, including cuts to the Maps/Geo, shopping, ads product, and trust and safety teams. As spotted by Bloomberg, disclosures filed with the state of California show that there were a handful of vice presidents and about two dozen directors impacted. I can confirm that Spyro Karetsos, Google’s chief compliance officer who reported to global affairs president Kent Walker, is gone. (Danielle Romain, who currently holds the title “VP of trust,” is taking over the role.)

Some of the accompanying restructurings make sense, like moving the Devices and Services group to a functional org structure, with key disciplines like design now working across Pixel, Nest and Fitbit. I wasn’t surprised to see the AR hardware team finally shuttered, given that it has been on life support for a while anyway. It has been clear that the Bard product group would eventually win the internal power struggle with the Assistant org, which saw steep cuts and a bunch of feature deprecations.

Even after last week, no one I talk to at Google is under the illusion that layoffs are over. There are still over 50,000 people working on Google Cloud, which saw rapid headcount growth during the pandemic and has yet to overtake Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure’s market share. The roughly 30,000-person ad sales group is another natural target.

Employees I’ve talked to agree that a bigger-than-normal wave of departures could also happen in the spring around Google’s annual performance review cycle. The HR department has quietly started letting managers give their reports low ratings without the previously mandated “support check-in” call, which removes some of the red tape previously required to fire people. “That effectively allows me to give zero notice and expedite someone out,” one manager said.

Heading into 2024, Google has plenty of external problems to contend with, from antitrust lawsuits to startups like Perplexity trying to unseat its dominance in search. But given the cultural shift that employees are grappling with, its biggest challenge may still come from within.

My colleagues at The Verge have done an amazing job covering all of the gadgets and gizmos at CES this year. If you haven’t already, be sure to also check out their best-in-show roundup.

I spent most of last week ducking in and out of Las Vegas hotels, meeting with companies like Reddit, Pinterest, and Instacart. I also managed to squeeze in a walk-through of the show floor, which feels increasingly less relevant as more of the action moves to suites and ballrooms at the big hotels. (Perhaps the most talked about device of the week, the Rabbit R1, was announced in a ballroom at the Wynn, not the official CES stage.)

The more times I attend CES, the more fascination I have with the show behind the show. In that spirit, below are my unofficial CES awards:

Notes on what else is happening in the tech industry:

Some interesting job moves I noticed since the last issue:

I’ll be back later this week with another issue. In the meantime, send me your feedback and tips. Thanks for subscribing.