According to the latest hotly debated post on the anonymous workplace forum Team Blind, Google employees are worried that the company will launch a new round of layoffs in January next year.
The post stated that Google has raised the standard for layoffs, and even if the overall productivity of engineers has increased, it will still lay off employees with poor performance in proportion.
At the same time, the stock price performance of Google’s parent company Alphabet has not performed as expected, which has also exacerbated employees’ concerns.
An anonymous post revealed that Google has increased the layoff rate for employees in the “lower buckets” of performance appraisal from 8% to 10%. IT Home quoted media reports that the “buckets” here should refer to employees with lower performance.
In addition, the post believes that the average number of code changes made by Google engineers has reached 500 times a year, so it is easier to find these low-performing employees than before.
The post added that in addition to poor performance, participating in the wrong project or being “targeted” by management may also be the trigger for layoffs.
Google’s parent company Alphabet’s main revenue comes from search engines and advertising businesses.
Alphabet’s stock price performance has been affected by factors such as antitrust lawsuits from the Department of Justice and the fact that early investments in artificial intelligence were mainly concentrated in hardware suppliers (such as Nvidia).
Although Alphabet’s third-quarter revenue, profit and sales of its major business units all exceeded analysts’ expectations, its traffic acquisition costs (TAC) were as high as $13.72 billion, higher than analysts’ expectations of $13.53 billion.