December 12, 2024 – Rumors are swirling on the anonymous workplace forum Team Blind that Google employees are bracing for a potential new wave of layoffs, slated to commence in January of next year. According to posts on the forum, the tech giant has tightened its criteria for job cuts, targeting employees with lower performance ratings even as the overall productivity of its engineering team has increased.
The whispers began with an anonymous post alleging that Google had increased the percentage of employees in the lower performance “buckets” who would be subject to layoffs, raising it from 8% to 10%. Media reports have interpreted these “buckets” to refer to employees with lower performance evaluations.
Furthermore, the post suggests that identifying these lower-performing employees has become easier due to the fact that the average number of code changes made by Google engineers has reached 500 per year. It adds that, besides poor performance, being involved in the wrong projects or being singled out by management could also trigger layoffs.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, derives most of its revenue from search engine and advertising businesses. However, its stock price has been under pressure due to various factors, including an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and the concentration of early investments in artificial intelligence primarily on hardware suppliers like Nvidia.
Despite Alphabet’s third-quarter financial results beating analysts’ expectations in terms of revenue, profit, and sales across its main business segments, the company’s traffic acquisition costs (TAC) rose to 13.72billion,higherthanthe13.53 billion analysts had forecast. This increase in TAC, along with the looming threat of layoffs, has added to the growing unease among Google employees.
