Google has asked employees to work with ‘more hunger’ in a leaked memo so ambiguous that staff are probably wondering whether the snack room is about to be padlocked.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, also said employees need to be ‘more entrepreneurial’. Will staff have to learn to pick said padlocks?
Elsewhere in his email, Pichai warned of ‘economic headwinds’ and said that Google would be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year.
The email, which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal, read in full: “Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.
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“In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing deployment and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas.”
Pichai continued: “Scarcity breeds clarity — this is something we have been saying since the earliest days of Google.
“It’s what drives focus and creativity that ultimately leads to better products that help people all over the world.”
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He added: “That’s the opportunity in front of us today, and I’m excited for us to rise to the moment again.”
It comes days after Facebook's head of engineering, Maher Saba, sent an internal memo to engineering managers telling them to ‘force out’ employees that are ‘coasting’.
Saba wrote: “If a direct report is coasting or is a low performer, they are not who we need; they are failing this company. As a manager, you cannot allow someone to be net neutral or negative for Meta.”
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Saba’s memo was reported on by The Information and came weeks after Mark Zuckerberg directly told Meta employees during a Q&A: “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
He added: “Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.”
Tech jobs tracking site Layoffs.fyi reported in May that tech companies were laying off employees at the highest rate since 2020.
That month, companies got rid of staff at the highest rate in two years and in April, 16,800 pink slips were dished out by 66 tech firms.
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UNILAD has approached Google and Meta for comment.
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Topics: Google, Facebook, Technology
Aisha Nozari