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Thousands of workers at Google laid off via email

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On the morning of January 20, one Google employee had to call tech support after getting hit with an unusual error message when they tried to log in to their work system.

Another employee’s manager was on vacation, so they had no one to reach out to when rumours of layoffs started to swirl.

A third was waking up to demands from their toddler when their phone started to buzz with text messages asking, “Are you safe?”

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The three employees, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, were all among the 12,000 workers laid off by Google that day.

While the extent of the layoffs was staggering, and by far the largest cuts in its history, it was the way the lay-offs were handled that stunned many inside and outside the company.

Google, which for years ranked as the top company to work for in the United States, laid off thousands of workers by e-mail.

And not just any employees — decades-long veterans of the company, at least one employee on health leave, and even an employee in labour with her second child were all cut, with little explanation.

Employees were left scrambling to determine who had been let go and those affected had no opportunity to say goodbye to colleagues or pack up their desks, former workers told CNN.

To many, Google’s approach to layoffs, while not unique, seemed out of step with its renowned employee-centric culture.

Google has for years been the prototype of a company that put its employees’ well-being top of mind, a fact almost as central to its public image as its core search engine.

It lavished employees with large compensation packages and perks, from in-office climbing walls and free gourmet meals to at-work massages and childcare.

The company engaged its staff in a common mission and encouraged them to freely share even critical thoughts at work.

Known for its longtime mantra of “don’t be evil,” Google effectively operated with another, possibly synonymous ethos: “don’t be corporate.”

But for some former employees affected by the layoffs, the cuts were just the latest example of a culture shift they say has been underway at Google for years.

A culture that prized openness and feted employees has increasingly been tested and eroded by internal scandals, walkouts, mounting public scrutiny, business demands and the reality that despite the best efforts of prior leaders, or more likely because of those efforts, Google has in fact become one very large corporation.

Alphabet's job losses affect teams across the company. (AP PHOTO) Credit: AP

In interviews with CNN, more than half a dozen current and former Google employees, including several affected by the recent layoffs, described a company whose culture has been changing in big and subtle ways for years, including scaled-back perks, reduced access to senior leadership and a focus on short-term business wins rather than long-term vision.

“At the end of the day, and probably at the beginning of the day, there is an abiding devotion to revenue and seemingly endless growth,” another employee affected by the January mass layoff told CNN.

“And that comes without any thought to employees’ welfare in the end.”

Margaret O’Mara, a tech historian and professor at the University of Washington who has written about the evolution of Silicon Valley, said Google’s layoffs by email “reflect this problem that ... Google has become such a big and, some would say, bureaucratic company.”

That growth makes it “particularly” hard for Google “to maintain (its image) that ‘we’re a kinder, gentler capitalism, we’re Google-y, we’re people-centric.’”

Asked for comment on this story, Google pointed CNN to its blog post on the January layoffs.

The company described the layoffs as a “difficult decision to set us up for the future” amid a difficult economic environment, and apologised that it would be “saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with.”

The changes at Google are emblematic of a larger evolution in tech as Silicon Valley matures and the founders who desired to do things differently have either been pressured to appease Wall Street or are replaced by executives from more corporate backgrounds.

Several other major tech companies have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, many from their more experimental, innovative divisions, as the industry confronts the reality that it may not be able to continue growing at breakneck speed forever.

Tech companies may also be seeking to regain some leverage over employees after years in which — through worker activism, a tight labour market and a negative shift in the public perception of tech giants — workers maintained significant power.

“I think tech is maybe no longer immune,” one former employee said, adding that the layoffs marked “sort of the first move, or maybe the final move, of Google and a lot of the other tech companies becoming a little more normal.”

“A lot of us workers at the bottom are just confused about where tech is headed,” the former employee said.

Not a conventional company

When Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, it was a relatively new public company and had just landed for the first time at the top of Fortune’s list of the top 100 companies to work for.

During her early years there, she worked in marketing and became known as the “The Bard of Google” for the internal emails she sent celebrating the company’s culture.

“For me, it wasn’t the tube slides and climbing walls and the fact that they reimbursed your Wi-Fi, it really was for me, about the people and I cared about the mission and the sense that it was very creative and freewheeling,” Stapleton told CNN in an interview.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in their first shareholder letter in 2004 that “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”

Among the company’s core tenets laid out in that letter was that “our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything,” and told shareholders to “expect us to add (employee) benefits rather than pare them down over time.”

The company emphasised the message that its employees were part of a larger mission to make the world a better, smarter place.

Google has been known for allowing workers to spend 20 per cent of their time on side projects that occasionally became real products.

Longtime former employees recall when Page and Brin still hosted weekly all-hands meetings, known internally as “TGIFs.”

Other former employees discussed a practice still in place to screen potential new employees for “Google-yness,” a personality fit with the company’s culture of collaboration and openness, during job interviews.

Google’s example set the stage for a wave of new-age companies that sought to emulate its example with open floorplans, in-office ping pong tables and luxe offsite events.

But many point to 2015 as a turning point.

In March of that year, Ruth Porat, previously the chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley and one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, became Google’s CFO.

Months later, Page and Brin announced that Sundar Pichai would take over as Google’s CEO, and that the company would be restructured to separate Google and the company’s other ambitious projects into subsidiaries of Alphabet.

It was also around this time that Google removed “don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, replacing it with “do the right thing.”

“You hire bankers and CFO positions from Wall Street and then they tend to want to please Wall Street, and you move away a little bit from what maybe the founders had intended,” one former employee affected by the layoffs said.

But, he added, the founders remained heavily invested in the company “so they sign off on this.”

The transition from Google to Alphabet set the stage for huge growth in the company’s share price, but it also changed the nature of what it meant to work for the tech giant, said Cameron Rout, a product manager who was among those laid off in January.

Suddenly, many of the most ambitious projects were spun off into other business units.

“The problem was, suddenly, you didn’t work for a company that was sending stuff to space or building autonomous cars,” Rout said.

Google was always, at its core, an advertising Business, but he said, “there was an identity associated with Google where people know that you could be on the team making self-driving cars.”

Google’s culture and reputation were further challenged with a series of events in 2017 and 2018 when employees staged mass walkouts to protest what they said was a workplace culture that had turned a blind eye to sexual harassment and discrimination.

Employees at the time also raised concerns about Google’s business dealings with the military, work in China and accusations that the company retaliated against workers who criticised it.

In the wake of the walkouts, Google made some positive changes, including ending forced arbitration for sexual harassment and abuse claims from employees.

But it also further clamped down on the internal transparency and openness that had been its hallmark, according to Stapleton, who helped organise the walkouts and left Google in 2019 after the company allegedly retaliated against her.

Google said at the time that an internal investigation found no evidence of retaliation

Stapleton, who now writes the Tech Support newsletter aimed at workers in the industry, said that “one of the major turning points” was when Google rolled back broad access to documents in its Google intranet and to other workers’ public calendar events, making many of them need-to-know only following the protests.

“That’s a great example of the tension in the culture ... everybody had open calendars forever,” she said, “that you could see anybody’s calendar was almost a flex of the culture, like, we’re so trusting and open. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to just dramatically roll that back to protect the power.”

More recently, former employees say, Google has pulled back on material perks like in-office massages and travel and offsite meeting budgets.

“I think a lot of us were hoping that it would be enough to keep our jobs because they were cutting all these expenses,” one laid-off worker said.

But the bigger effect has been from shifts to a culture that once welcomed employee feedback and criticism.

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