Google employees blast ‘profoundly boring’ management amid lay-offs

Employees of a giant global company have taken to LinkedIn to vent their frustrations with its leadership and the way it handled recent job cuts.

Current and former employees of a giant global company have taken to LinkedIn to vent their frustrations with its leadership and the way management handled recent job cuts.

Current and former Google employees took to LinkedIn to vent their frustrations at the way management has handled the most recent round of lay-offs — with one software engineer blasting higher-ups as lacking “one single visionary leader.”

“From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed,” Diane Hirsh Theriault wrote on her LinkedIn page on Wednesday, reports the New York Post.

Ms Theriault reacted to the news that Google was laying off several hundred people from its ad sales team.

Last week, the company shed around 1,000 employees from its Pixel, Fitbit and Nest divisions — a move that reportedly outraged staffers who were particularly upset by the fact Sundar Pichai did not communicate directly with those affected.

On Thursday, Mr Pichai told employees that more job cuts are likely this year, though he cautioned they will not be on the scale of those from a year ago.

“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo.

“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”

“Call me old school, but I think that if you find yourself in a situation where you need to let someone go, you owe it to them to meet them face-to-face, look them in the eyes, and acknowledge their humanity,” Kenneth Smith, a former engineering manager who laid off by Google, wrote on his LinkedIn account.

Current and former Google employees took to social media to vent their frustrations at management’s handling of the recent round of lay-offs. Picture: AFP

Mr Smith, who acknowledged that one supervisor followed up with him after news of the redundancies broke, wrote that he “harboured a lot of anger and frustration at Google’s leadership for how they handled the lay-offs” of 12,000 colleagues last year.

“I don’t see a lot of evidence that they’ve learned much from that experience,” he wrote.

Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and tech commentator, reacted to Mr Smith’s LinkedIn post on X, blasting Google as a “faceless corporation.”

“Google [is] successfully cementing their reputation as the place that after years of service, all you get is an email from the system that you’re fired,” Mr Orosz wrote on X.

“It’s just business. They can fire you any time (and will, if it’s the business interest) and you do the same and leave any time (when it’s your personal interest),” Mr Orosz wrote, adding “Forget ‘loyalty’ or ‘commitment’ both ways.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned this week that more job cuts were coming this year. Picture: AFP

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 lay-offs, the company boasted an overall global workforce of nearly 187,000 people.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that it was “responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” adding that organisational changes included “some role eliminations globally.”

“We’re continuing to support any impacted employees as they look for new roles here at Google and beyond,” the spokesperson said.

Shares of Google parent company Alphabet Inc rose by more than two per cent on Friday.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Google employees blast ‘profoundly boring’ management amid lay-offs