Google cuts jobs and consolidates engineering

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After cutting its hiring rate last year, Google has said it will cut 100 jobs from its recruiting arm and warned that it may not be able to keep all of its engineers.

Faced with reduced hiring, Google said it first cut its external recruiting contracts, but realised it needed to cut internally as well, Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president of people operations, wrote in the company’s blog.

“Given the state of the economy, we recognised that we needed fewer people focused on hiring,” he explained.

In a separate post, Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research, Alan Eustace, wrote that the web firm is going to further consoildate its offices around the world.

Last September, Google shut down its engineering department in Phoenix, Arizona in the US, moving the employees to other offices. “This move enabled us to build larger and more effective teams, reduce communication overhead, and give engineers increased options for future projects,” Eustace said.

Now, Google is also shutting down engineering work in Texas, Norway and Sweden – and may not be able to keep all the roles open at different locations. “Our strong desire is to keep as many of these 70 engineering employees at Google as possible,” wrote Eustace. “However, we do recognise the upheaval and heartache that these changes may have on Google families, and that we may not be able to keep 100 per cent of these exceptional employees.”

Despite this, Eustace stressed that Google’s goal isn’t to cut jobs. “Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core.”

Google said it has thousands of engineers across 40 offices in over 20 countries.

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