Until the January layoffs the company was fairly even keeled. Most of the Google equivalent of an all-hands meeting were concerned around the layoffs happening with other companies.
Initially the message was “no, there won’t be layoffs”. Around November it became “we can’t predict the future”.
And then 12k employees were laid off via email without even telling their managers. The first that team leads heard about it was if a laid off employee sent a farewell email.
There wasn’t a list anywhere of who was laid off and all their corp accounts were active until the final day of their 60-90 day warning period.
So sentiment now is essentially: fuck you Sundar, and I know productive and smart devs who have done essentially 0 work since January, in part because they’re upset but also because their managers got laid off/roadmaps changed/etc
The mass layoffs caused a lot of fear so even high level managers started dropping their roadmaps to focus on anything that would look good for them specifically.
The tldr is it’s all a mess and the bubbly happy sentiment is a thing of the past.
The day google stops using fun names for things like this, even unofficially, is the day google is no more.
The internal politics still haven’t recovered from January by all accounts. They probably won’t recover until Sundar is gone.
Can you share what internal politics happened?
Until the January layoffs the company was fairly even keeled. Most of the Google equivalent of an all-hands meeting were concerned around the layoffs happening with other companies.
Initially the message was “no, there won’t be layoffs”. Around November it became “we can’t predict the future”.
And then 12k employees were laid off via email without even telling their managers. The first that team leads heard about it was if a laid off employee sent a farewell email.
There wasn’t a list anywhere of who was laid off and all their corp accounts were active until the final day of their 60-90 day warning period.
So sentiment now is essentially: fuck you Sundar, and I know productive and smart devs who have done essentially 0 work since January, in part because they’re upset but also because their managers got laid off/roadmaps changed/etc
The mass layoffs caused a lot of fear so even high level managers started dropping their roadmaps to focus on anything that would look good for them specifically.
The tldr is it’s all a mess and the bubbly happy sentiment is a thing of the past.