Google on Tuesday announced plans to lay off several hundred workers days after the search giant said it would slash at least 1,000 jobs — sparking backlash among the rank-and-file that “corporate overlords” have ruined the firm’s “culture.”
Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, circulated a memo saying the latest cuts would impact members of the sales team, according to Business Insider.
The shakeup was part of a restructuring effort that will affect the unit that sells ads to large businesses, he wrote.
“Going forward GCS [Google Customer Solutions] will be our core channel for scaling growth by dynamically delivering the right treatment to every customer — while LCS [Large Customer Sales] will focus on transformational growth for our largest, most sophisticated customers,” Schindler reportedly wrote in the memo.
The Post has sought comment from Google.
Last week, Google confirmed it was laying off around 1,000 people in its Pixel, Fitbit and Nest units.
News of the layoffs was communicated to each individual division — making it difficult to ascertain the exact number of people who got the axe.
Google employees were furious with CEO Sundar Pichai for not speaking publicly about the layoffs, according to The Verge.
“Thank you, our corporate overlords, for our new annual tradition,” one employee wrote on the company’s internal meme board.
Google managers told The Verge that Pichai was to blame for the layoffs.
“Everyone at Google understands that these [cuts] are coming from the top,” one veteran manager told the news site.
“There’s no way this was the decision of a few disconnected orgs in isolation.”
An engineering director who spent 18 years at the company griped that his firing was “extremely impersonal.”
“Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall,” the director wrote, according to The Verge.
Last year, Google laid off some 12,000 workers as tech companies looked to cut costs in anticipation of an economic downturn.
At the time of the layoffs, the company boasted an overall global workforce of nearly 187,000 people.
“Every year we go through a rigorous process to structure our team to provide the best service to our ads customers,” a company spokesperson told Business Insider.
“We map customers to the right specialist teams and sales channels to meet their service needs,” the representative said, adding that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated and impacted employees will be able to apply for open roles on the team or elsewhere at Google.”
Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc were trading lower by some 0.6% as of mid-day Tuesday.
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