Google staff anxiety runs high after 12,000 jobs cut

Google employees, after watching peers at rival tech firms lose their jobs en masse, were anxious about when layoffs would happen to them.

Then on January 20 morning, some of them couldn’t get into their corporate accounts.

The company, owned by Alphabet Inc, had finally decided to cut 12,000 employees, or 6 per cent of the workforce.

Employees described a mostly orderly, if impersonal, transition, communicated mostly via the same technology products they helped build, with no direct answers for individuals about why they were included or not, Bloomberg reports.

Some found out they had lost their jobs via messages sent to their personal e-mail addresses.

With no central way to see which roles had been eliminated, the remaining workers took to writing to their peers on messaging app Google Chat to see if it worked. If not, it meant that person had lost their job, according to a Google employee who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

In a message to staff announcing the layoffs, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai framed the cuts as a way for the company to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence.

However, Area 120, an in-house incubator for new ideas, was decimated.

The unit’s managing partner and workers on three projects slated to be folded into Google were spared, but virtually all other employees were laid off, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Google employee Dallas Barnes, a visual designer, wrote on Twitter that he was the only member of his team who survived the cuts.

“The amount of sadness, frustration, and confusion I’m feeling right now is hard to put into words,” he wrote.

There had been a sense of foreboding among Googlers about the possibility of layoffs, especially as other tech firms started to announce cuts to their workforce in recent weeks, said Mr Keith Chaney, who worked on Google’s partnerships strategy team for about a year. He lost his job on Friday.

“I wasn’t super shocked,” he said. “There was a looming thought that it could happen. I just didn’t know to what extent and when.”