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by spwa4 54 days ago
Only if you count a single day. If you count yearly Google has not stopped layoffs of "more than a few thousand" since 2023. And I bet some months get above 1000. The big layoff in 2023 was not actually the first time by the way, that was much earlier (there was a wave of office consolidation in the 2010s). Also the 2023 layoff was at least 3 distinct waves.

And constant layoffs very much have the result on morale you'd expect today.

1 comments

Link?
Ask any Googler.
Googler here! Opinions are my own.

Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.

To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.

That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...

> Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year ...

https://www.warntracker.com/?company=google

blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals.

If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...