They’re cutting most people’s comp and dressing it up like they’re doing them a favor. The message is basically: “good news, we’re now rewarding top performers even more… by taking from everyone else.” It’s not about recognizing excellence; it’s about squeezing more out of people with less. And naturally, it all rides on their annual review system, which is subjective at best and arbitrary at worst. So now, their raise depends even more on whether their manager feels like fighting for them in a broken system. This sets people up to compete instead of work together. And the timing is pleb-crushingly tone-deaf. After myriad industry layoffs and burnout, they roll this out like it’s some kind of gift. It’s not. It’s just another way to try to do “more” with less, while pretending they’re “investing in talent.”
Crabs in a bucket
They’re expected to kill each other for a chance at more than scraps.
The only way to win is to _ the ones responsible for putting the crabs in the bucket in the first place
Google is abusing most of their workforce through major pay cuts.
Fixed that title for you, Business Insider.
Google has entered the IBM era.
No wonder a lot of their top engineers have been leaving recently.
Dance, monkeys, or we will give your job to AI!
(We will give your job to AI regardless, then hire you back at a lower rate when it goes to shit).
My employer did basically this and it’s really only used for nickel and diming employees. At best you get 100% of what you would’ve been due, but you probably end up getting 95% of it. So while you might miss out on a couple hundred dollars the company saved millions by doing this across the board.
Google’s talent pool must be a joke these days. Every single product I can think of that they make is just awful in 2025.
Google now is like IBM in the 1980s: it has a great future behind it.
This is a downgrade worded like a upgrade.
Time to unionize
Sounds like anyone intelligent and talented will find work in a less exploiting environment.
And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.
Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.
On the other hand, it’s also really sad to see what they’ve become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.
The good Google is dead. I’d love to see them get completely buried.
