As many of you know by now, Google announced mass layoffs due to “difficult economic cycles.” Those Googlers in the US were already informed by Friday morning if they had a job at Google or were no longer employed. Googlers outside the US will not find out for a month or so if they were part of these layoffs.
Sadly, I know many US-based Googlers who were already notified they were laid off. Some of them were Googlers I’ve known for over 15 years, and some of them just started at Google over the past couple of years. Some of them were part of the Google Search team, and some were part of public relations; some were in completely different divisions that I don’t work with.
I think Gary Illyes, one of the Googlers we all know and love, who is part of the Google Search Relations team, put it really well on LinkedIn, he wrote:
Since I wrote this in private conversations dozens of times the past couple days, I hope this will save some time:
Googlers outside the US don’t know yet if they lost their jobs; it will take a few more weeks due to the local labor laws. This is also explained in the memo published on blog.google.
We still have the Google Search Relations team, which is comforting to me, however it’s super tough to work with this kind of stress — not knowing if we still have a job, that is. Until we do, we will try to continue to do our best with what we’ve been doing for the past 15 years of this team’s existence: get information out, both online and in person, so people can do better in Google Search, and lurk on the internet to get information back to search engineering about the issues publishers face.
Again, we don’t know what the future holds for us, but I trust we’ll be fine, one way or another.
PS: heartfelt thank you to all of you who pinged me about this.
I cannot imagine a Google without Gary, without John, Martin, Lizzi, Daniel, without that whole team. It seems unimaginable for Google to let any of them go. But when it comes to widespread layoffs like this, I am not sure if anyone is safe. John mentioned some of his feelings about this on Mastodon publicly as well. And there is this thread on Twitter: