The angry Googler is done being a nice guy.
Current and former employees of the tech giant take to LinkedIn to air their frustrations with management's response to recent layoffs, with one software engineer saying it lacks “one visionary leader.” He strongly criticized the upper management.
“From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they're all very boring and glazed-over,” Diane Hirsch Theriault wrote on her LinkedIn page on Wednesday.
Thériault was reacting to the news that Google will lay off hundreds of people from its advertising sales team.
The company laid off about 1,000 employees from its Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest divisions last week, a move reportedly made by CEO Sundar Pichai without direct communication with those affected. This fact infuriated some employees who were particularly upset.
On Thursday, Pichai told employees that further layoffs are likely this year, but warned that they won't be on the scale of a year ago.
“We have ambitious goals and will invest in big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees in an internal memo on Wednesday. First obtained by The Verge.
“The reality is that we have to make hard choices to create this investment capacity.”
“I don't mind being called an old-fashioned person, but when you find yourself in a situation where you have to let someone go, you have an obligation to meet them face-to-face, look them in the eye, and acknowledge their humanity. ” Kenneth Smith, a former engineering manager who was fired by Google, wrote on his LinkedIn account.
Smith acknowledged that after news of the layoffs broke, one of his bosses followed up and said that last year, 12,000 colleagues expressed “tremendous anger and frustration with Google's leadership in handling the layoffs.” I hugged you,” he wrote.
“I don't see much evidence that they learned much from that experience,” he wrote.
Gergely Orosh, a software engineer and technology commentator, responded to Smith's LinkedIn post about X, calling Google a “faceless company.”
“Google [is] “We have managed to solidify our reputation that no matter how many years you work there, you only get a termination email from the system,” Orosz wrote to X.
“It's just business. “They can fire you at any time (if it's a business interest they would) and you can always do the same thing and quit (if it's a personal benefit) ” Orosz wrote, adding: ”
Last year, Google laid off about 12,000 employees as technology companies sought to cut costs in anticipation of an economic downturn.
At the time of the layoffs, the company had approximately 187,000 employees worldwide.
Company representative told Business Insider “We are investing responsibly in our biggest priorities and the important opportunities ahead,” it said, adding that the organizational changes included “the elimination of some roles globally.”
“We continue to support affected employees as they explore new roles within and outside of Google,” a Google representative said.
Shares of Google's parent company Alphabet rose more than 2% on Friday.
