Morale has taken a hit, but the work and people are still great
Pros
The best part of working at Google has always been the people and the culture. I get to work with very smart, hard-working, and dependable people. My teammates are great. The part of my management chain I know and talk to are good at setting technical direction and treat their people with kindness. I also am fortunate to work on fun technical challenges (this isn't the case in all of Google)
Cons
The recent layoffs were handled very poorly. Performance played almost no factor, meaning that we are left feeling like it doesn't matter how productive we are or how good we are at collaborating and helping others. The recent news that Cloud is doing hot-desking and desk sharing seems absurd for a company as wealthy as Google and which depends so heavily on its employees. The announcement presentation of Bard was a debacle; how do we not make sure we have a backup phone for a demo like that? It was disheartening to see from the level of employees "on the ground", where we work very hard to have redundancy for important things and do our jobs as well as we can.
