| 送交者: icemessenger[♂☆★★★SuperMod★★★☆♂] 于 2024-02-17 2:40 已读 5044 次 | icemessenger的个人频道 |
Google’s Once Happy Offices Feel the Chill of Layoffs
位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的谷歌办公室。去年，这里遭受了裁员的打击。 去年10月的一个下午，当黛安·赫什·特里奥特的同事吃完午餐回到谷歌位于马萨诸塞州剑桥的办公室时，他刷工作证进不了公司大楼了。很快他就意识到，这是被解雇的信号。 6park.com 6park.comDr. 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. 6park.com赫什·特里奥特博士很快得知，她在剑桥的大多数谷歌新闻工程师同事也失去了工作。谷歌的一个工会表示，新闻部门有40多人被裁，不过其中一些人后来在谷歌的其他部门找到了工作。 6park.com 6park.comDr. Hirsh Theriault’s experience is increasingly common at Google, where rolling job cuts in recent months, after a year of significant layoffs, have employees on edge. The layoffs have slowed down projects and prompted employees to spend working hours trying to learn which work groups have been hit and who could be next, said 10 current and former Google employees, including some who asked for anonymity so they could speak candidly about their jobs. 6park.com赫什·特里奥特的经历在谷歌越来越普遍，在经历了一年的大规模裁员后，谷歌最近几个月又在不断裁员，闹得人心惶惶。10名现任和前任谷歌员工表示，裁员拖慢了项目进度，并使员工不得不花费工作时间，去了解哪些工作小组受到冲击，谁可能是下一个被裁减的对象，其中一些员工要求匿名，以便坦率地谈论自己的工作。 6park.com 6park.comWhat’s more, the layoffs have shifted the narrative that long defined working at Google — that it was more of a tinker’ community than a workaday office, where creativity and thinking out of the box was encouraged. That it was a fun, different kind of place to work. 6park.com更重要的是，裁员改变了外界长期以来对谷歌工作的看法——人们曾经认为它更像是一个体验型的社区，而不是一个常规的办公室，谷歌鼓励创造力和跳出常规思维，是一个有趣的、与众不同的工作场所。
When Diane Hirsh Theriault’s co-worker returned from lunch to Google’s Cambridge, Mass., office one afternoon in October, his work badge couldn’t open a turnstile. He quickly realized it was a sign that he had been laid off. 6park.com
黛安·赫什·特里奥特是谷歌新闻的软件工程师。她在领英上的一篇帖子中写道，“四点半的时候，大楼里有一半是空的。” 谷歌首席执行官桑达尔·皮查伊一年多前表示，该公司将裁员1.2万人，占员工总数的6%，并称这是“为未来做好准备的一个艰难决定”。 6park.com 6park.comThose cuts have trickled into this year in what Mr. Pichai said could be much smaller, rolling layoffs throughout the year. Since early January, the company has cut more than a thousand jobs, affecting its ad sales division, YouTube and employees working on the company’s voice-operated assistant. 6park.com皮查伊说，今年的裁员规模可能会小得多，将在全年滚动进行。自1月初以来，该公司已经裁员1000多人，受影响的有广告销售部门、YouTube和公司语音操作助手的员工。 6park.com 6park.comAlphabet, Google’s parent company, has said it is trying to shed expenses to pay for its growing investment in artificial intelligence. And Google is trying to reduce layers of bureaucracy so that employees can focus on the biggest company priorities, said Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokeswoman. The company added that it was not conducting a companywide layoff, and that reorganizations were part of the normal course of business. 6park.com谷歌的母公司Alphabet表示，它正在努力削减开支，以支付在人工智能领域不断增长的投资。谷歌发言人科特妮·门奇尼表示，谷歌正在努力减少官僚机构的层级，这样员工就可以专注于公司最重要的事情。谷歌还表示，并非全公司范围的裁员，重组是正常业务过程的一部分。 6park.com 6park.com“The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices,” Mr. Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Jan. 17. For some divisions, “this means reorganizing and, in some cases, eliminating roles.” Teams could still cut additional roles throughout the year, he added. 6park.com“现实情况是，要为这项投资创造产能，我们必须做出艰难的选择，”皮查伊在1月17日给员工的一份备忘录中写道。对于一些部门来说，“这意味着重组，在某些情况下，还意味着取消角色。”他补充说，各团队全年仍有可能裁员。
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said more than a year ago that the company would cull 12,000 jobs, or 6 percent of the work force, describing it as “a difficult decision to set us up for the future.” 6park.com
谷歌首席执行官桑达尔·皮查伊去年给员工发了一封电子邮件，称裁员1.2万人是“为我们的未来做准备的一个艰难决定”。 员工们说，工作场所的气氛变得闷闷不乐。虽然谷歌已经开始加速开发人工智能产品，以跟上微软和初创公司OpenAI等竞争对手的步伐，但为该公司构建技术的一些人却感觉自己不再那么重要。 6park.com 6park.comNow “the buildings are half empty at 4:30,” Dr. Hirsh Theriault wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That’s gone.” 6park.com现在“4点半的时候，大楼里有一半是空的”，赫什·特里奥特博士在领英的一篇帖子中写道。“我知道很多人，包括我自己，曾经为了完成演示版本而在晚上和周末加班，或者只是出于无聊。这种情况已经一去不复返了。”
Employees say the workplace mood has turned glum. While Google has shifted into overdrive to develop artificial intelligence products and keep pace with competitors like Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, some of the humans that build the company’s technology feel less important. 6park.com
6park.comGoogle’s layoffs have been smaller than those at some other big tech companies like Meta. And as a percentage of the company’s total work force, they are far smaller than recent cuts at companies like Xerox and the livestreaming platform Twitch. Google’s full-time work force was 182,502 at the end of 2023, just 4 percent smaller than at the end of 2022. On Tuesday, the company said it had a $20.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2023, up 52 percent from a year earlier. 6park.com谷歌的裁员规模一直小于Meta等其他一些大型科技公司；从占公司员工总数的比例来看，也远低于施乐和直播平台Twitch等公司。截至2023年底，谷歌的全职员工人数为182502人，仅比2022年底减少了4%。周二，该公司表示，它在2023年最后一个季度实现了207亿美元的利润，同比增长52%。 6park.com 6park.comBut Google’s job cuts have accompanied broader changes in how the company operated as it reshuffled work groups and removed management layers. Workers complain that reorganization has been chaotically carried out and poorly communicated. 6park.com但在谷歌裁员的同时，该公司的运营方式也发生了更广泛的变化，它重组了工作小组，取消了某些管理层级。员工们抱怨说，重组工作很混乱，沟通也很糟糕。
与其他一些大型科技公司相比，谷歌的裁员规模较小，但与此同时，该公司的运营方式也发生了更广泛的变化。 一名知情人士表示，YouTube解雇了一个供应商经理团队，该团队负责批准采购订单，以便内容审核公司获得报酬，但该公司没有通知其他依赖该团队的小组，尽管其中一些员工后来得以复职。 6park.com 6park.comWhen layoffs resumed in January, a Google worker in Switzerland started an internal document for employees to track the job cuts since the company has said little to them about where it is making the cuts. The document has become an essential source of information, employees said, along with news reports, social media and the old-fashioned office rumor mill. 6park.com今年1月谷歌重新开始裁员后，瑞士的一名员工开始编写一份内部文件，让员工跟踪裁员情况，因为谷歌几乎没有向员工透露裁员的具体地点。员工们说，除了新闻报道、社交媒体和老式的办公室谣言外，这份文件已经成为一个重要的信息来源。 6park.com 6park.com“From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare,” said Meghan M. Biro, whose firm, TalentCulture, creates content about best practices in human resources. “It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer.” 6park.com“从人力资源的角度来看，这是一场噩梦，”梅根·比罗说。她的公司TalentCulture制作有关人力资源最佳实践的内容。“这完全颠覆了他们作为理想雇主的形象。”
When YouTube laid off one of its vendor manager teams, which are responsible for approving purchase orders so that content moderation firms get paid, the company did not notify other groups that rely on the team, one person said, though some of the workers were offered the chance to get their jobs back. 6park.com
6park.comGoogle said leaders had communicated clearly to teams when they were undergoing changes. 6park.com谷歌表示，当团队发生变化时，领导者已经与团队进行了清晰的沟通。 6park.com 6park.comWorkers warned in interviews that some of the cuts could prove disruptive to parts of the business already struggling to complete thorny tasks. In January, Google cut hundreds of employees from its core engineering organization, responsible for its infrastructure and tools used across the company. 6park.com员工们在接受采访时警告说，一些裁员可能会对已经在努力完成棘手任务的业务部门造成破坏。今年1月，谷歌从其核心工程部门裁减了数百名员工，这些员工负责整个公司使用的基础设施和工具。 6park.com 6park.comOne of the core division’s main priorities is helping Google comply with the European Digital Markets Act when the law goes into effect on March 6. The law will make tech giants show consumers their choices for online services, such as web browsers, and force them to get consent to share user data within the company. But employees working on the efforts fear that the company is behind schedule and that it could be difficult for Google to be in full compliance by the deadline, two people with knowledge of the matter said. 6park.com欧洲数字市场法案将于3月6日生效，该部门的核心任务之一是帮助谷歌遵守该法案。这项法律将迫使科技巨头向消费者表明它们对网络浏览器等在线服务的选择，并强制要求它们在公司内部共享用户数据时征得同意。但两位知情人士说，参与这项工作的员工担心，公司的进度落后，可能很难在最后期限前完全遵守规定。 6park.com 6park.comGoogle said it had already started rolling out consent screens to European users in January and expected to introduce more changes ahead of the deadline. It added that the recent job reductions in its core division would not affect the timing. 6park.com谷歌表示，它已于今年1月开始向欧洲用户推出同意声明，预计将在截止日期前推出更多改变。该公司补充称，其核心部门最近的裁员不会影响时间安排。
鲁珀特·布雷亨尼去年夏天被解雇，他在谷歌工作了16年，大部分时间在苏黎世。“谷歌吸引你的是激情，”他说。 长期以来，谷歌一直鼓励员工从事实验性项目。但四名不愿透露姓名的工作人员表示，在过去一年里，实验性工作被证明是有风险的。该公司几乎关闭了努力开发新产品和服务的内部孵化器Area 120，并改变了试图建立新公司的“登月工厂”X的战略。 6park.com 6park.comGoogle said employees were constantly doing “extraordinarily innovative, ambitious things across the company.” 6park.com谷歌表示，员工们一直在“全公司范围内做着非常创新、雄心勃勃的事情”。 6park.com 6park.comEmployees are more reluctant to ask for the so-called 20 percent, or side, projects, which used to be a way to explore an idea outside their regular work that they found compelling, five people said. That was a regrettable shift for Rupert Breheny, who spent 16 years at Google, mostly in Zurich, working on products like Google Street View in Maps. 6park.com五名知情人士表示，员工更不愿意要求所谓的20%的兼职项目，过去，他们利用这些项目在日常工作之外探索他们认为有吸引力的想法。对于鲁珀特·布雷亨尼来说，这是一个令人遗憾的转变，他在谷歌工作了16年，大部分时间在苏黎世，从事谷歌街景地图等产品的开发。 6park.com 6park.com“The thing that took you to Google was passion,” said Mr. Breheny, who was laid off last summer. “You could have fun making stuff. It stayed like that for a long time.” 6park.com“谷歌吸引你的是激情，”去年夏天被解雇的布雷亨尼说。“你可以享受创作东西的乐趣。很长一段时间都是如此。”
Google employees were for a long time encouraged to work on experimental projects. But doing something experimental has over the last year proved to be risky, said four workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company has all but shuttered Area 120, its in-house incubator that tried to develop new products and services, and altered the strategy of X, a “moonshot factory” that tried to build new companies. 6park.com
请点这里投票，“赞”助支持！