Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Here it goes - Google started Dumping it's employees!


Changes to recruiting


As we made clear during our last quarterly earnings call in October, Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate. Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring.

Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions.

We know this change will be very difficult for the people concerned, and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google. They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done.

Posted by Laszlo Bock, Vice President, People Operations

Changes to engineering

At Google we recognized early on that branching out beyond Mountain View was key to building innovative products for users everywhere. That's why we put so much effort into hiring outstanding engineers in a wide mix of countries. Having offices distributed around the globe is critical to Google's long-term success, and today we have thousands of engineers working in 40 offices in more than 20 countries. It has enabled us to make significant improvements in our products and attract more users globally.

It has also presented unique challenges. The most difficult of these being to coordinate our efforts across all geographies, and provide engineers with significant, meaningful projects that make a real difference to people's lives. Last September we asked engineers in
Phoenix, Arizona to move to other offices, and the vast majority have done so. This move enabled us to build larger and more effective teams, reduce communication overhead, and give engineers increased options for future projects. Today we are doing the same thing in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. Our strong desire is to keep as many of these 70 engineering employees at Google as possible. However, we do recognize the upheaval and heartache that these changes may have on Google families, and that we may not be able to keep 100% of these exceptional employees.

Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research

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