Google’s once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs

A cyclist rides a Google bike by Android characters on the Google campus on Jan 30, 2024 in Mountain View, California. Employees say the workplace mood has turned glum. While Google has shifted into overdrive to develop AI products and keep pace with competitors such as Microsoft and the startup OpenAI, some of the humans that build the company’s technology feel less important. — AFP

SAN FRANCISCO: When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realised it was a sign that he had been laid off.

Hirsh Theriault soon learned that most of her fellow Google News engineers in Cambridge had also lost their jobs. More than 40 people in the news division were cut, a union at the company said, though a number of them were later offered jobs elsewhere inside Google.