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Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts

Accepted submission by fliptop at 2022-12-28 12:19:06
Techonomics

Google [nytimes.com] workers in Switzerland sent a letter this month to the company’s vice president of human resources, outlining their worries that a new employee evaluation system could be used to cull the work force [dnyuz.com]:

“The number and spread of reports that reached us indicates that at least some managers were aggressively pressured to apply a quota” on a process that could lead to employees getting negative ratings and potentially losing their jobs, five workers and employee representatives wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The letter signaled how some Google employees are increasingly interpreting recent management decisions as warnings that the company may be angling to conduct broader layoffs. From the impending closure of a small office and the cancellation of a content-moderation project to various efforts to ease budgets during 2023 planning meetings, the Silicon Valley behemoth has become a tinderbox of anxiety, according to interviews with 14 current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

[...] The worries have grown as Google’s tech industry peers have handed out pink slips amid a souring global economy [nytimes.com]. Last month, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, purged its ranks by 11,000 [nytimes.com], or about 13 percent of its work force. Amazon also began laying off about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs [nytimes.com], or about 3 percent of its corporate employees.

Even Google, which is on track to make tens of billions of dollars in profits this year, has had to come to terms with a slowdown. In October, as the digital advertising market slumped, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported that profit dropped [nytimes.com] 27 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, to $13.9 billion.

Related: Amazon Will Reportedly Lay Off 10,000 Employees [soylentnews.org]


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