Is Google Growing Up?

Google announced that they are laying off a quarter of their recruiting staff and also closing down several offices and less popular services. This of course made all the major news outlets because Google is supposed to be recession proof. Here are my thoughts and experiences on the matter.

First of all, it sucks to be one of those people losing his or her job, but seriously, Google's whole recruiting department has a bad reputation in the Silicon Valley. Google recruiters are known to be very unprofessional and haughty. I have heard tons of stories where Google recruiters wasted people's time by rescheduling interviews or doing a switch and bait on the job. Their recruiting process is intentionally vague to hold up the exclusiveness of Google, but that is also unprofessional because job seekers need to know what they are going to do. I think they treat people like crap during the whole recruiting process because they assume that everyone wants to work at Google, and that turns a lot of people off. Funnily enough my friend who works at Google actually hated the recruiting experience he went through, and when he heard that these recruiters were laid off he cheered a little.

Another thing that many people have said about Google is that they do not need more than 20000 people to run its business. Our CEO said this week that "Google just hires a bunch of PhDs that do not know how the real world works." That is why they have so many weird projects that start up and then shut down. Also, they have a lot of redundancy in the various services they offer and that is just wasteful. The way Google operates is extremely inefficient, and pretty much everyone knows it. Seriously I don't know why their shareholders haven't protested the way Google operates because if they trimmed all the useless stuff and focused on their core business then I wouldn't be surprised if their earning per share were $20 instead of $4 to $5.

Anyway, I am hoping that Google becomes more serious about its business and announce more layoffs. It would be painful for those laid off, but maybe they will start something new and make the Valley more interesting. Google is so last century.