“Thank you, masters of our company, for our new annual tradition.”
If you took a peek last week at Memegen, the irreverent internal meme board for employees at Google, you would have seen this quote with thousands of upvotes. Even during a particularly bad week of layoffs in tech, Google led the way by suddenly laying off more than 1,000 people without any explanation.
Since 12,000 people were laid off a year ago, smaller layoffs at the sprawling conglomerate have continued at a steady rate, creating a sense of unease. Not all of these previous cuts have been publicly covered, such as the roughly 10 percent reduction in the size of the Public Policy Group in mid-November.