Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
In a 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai ( who has received over a billion dollars in stock grants alone over the last few years) said that “there has to be a dialogue of respect on both sides” in the modern workplace. Just under a year-and-a-half later, they laid off Jeremy Joslin, who had worked at the company for 20 years, via email, along with 12,000 other employees.
Some Googlers who didn’t check their email before going to work found themselves standing in a line where many people found that both their keycards and their positions at the company had been deactivated. In 2022, Google hired 10,000 people in the second quarter alone. When announcing the layoffs, Pichai blamed the layoffs on “periods of dramatic growth…[that led Google to hire] for a different economic reality than the one [they] face today.”
When Microsoft laid off 10,000 people last week, CEO Satya Nadella ( $55 million a year in compensation) claimed that Microsoft saw “customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less.” That same day, Amazon Head of Worldwide Retail Doug Herrington blamed the “cost to serve” of “labor shortages, supply chain difficulties, inflation, and productivity overhang” to justify laying off 18,000 people.
