Confronting company executives is already a daunting prospect. Asking them sticky questions while they’re dressed in costume is downright spooky. But such was the case for Google employees who attended the tech giant’s all-hands meeting Wednesday.
Ahead of Halloween, Alphabet gathered employees to discuss company earnings posted late Tuesday. Revenue increased 15% to $88.27 billion, primarily due to Google’s steep investments in AI that rocketed sales of its Cloud functions.
Executives were dressed for the occasion, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who wore a a T-shirt reading, “ERROR 404 COSTUME NOT FOUND” accompanied by a pixelated dinosaur illustration; CFO Anat Ashkenazi, who wore the basketball jersey of retired Indiana Pacers star Reggie Miller; and chief scientist Jeff Dean, who was dressed as a starfish, CNBC reported.
A Google spokesperson confirmed to Fortune that some execs were in costume during the regularly scheduled quarterly meeting, where they answered over 20 questions from employees ranging from products to cost cutting. Google said it’s continuing to hire for priority roles.
But the costumes appeared to do little to assuage the tension some employees felt following the earnings call, which alluded to impending cost cuts. Employees reportedly asked about retention and opportunities for promotion.
“There is a reality to it,” Brian Ong, vice president of Google recruiting, said in the meeting, according to a recording reviewed by CNBC. “We are hiring less than we did a couple of years ago.”
Tenuous tech jobs
Ashkenazi, who replaced former CFO Ruth Porat, also hinted about cost cuts. Google has been successful in its cost-saving and efficiency-increasing measures, but "any organization can always push a little further," Ashkenazi said. The comments mirrored those of Pichai at the beginning of the year, when he warned that Google’s “ambitious goals” also require job cuts.
Google employees are familiar with the uncertain outcomes cost-saving strategies can take. Despite recent success for Google’s Cloud, the unit also conducted sweeping layoffs in May, reportedly letting go of fewer than 100 employees. Google has 1,000 fewer employees this year compared to the same period last year, Fortune previously reported.
Big tech is experiencing its slowest earnings growth in six quarters, and the industry hasn’t been immune from mass layoffs, which have surpassed 130,000 cuts this year, including 3,765 across the sector in September, and 528 from DropBox alone announced earlier this week.
Google’s big AI investment push may continue to shake up headcount and team sizes, Pichai admitted, announcing during the earnings call that over 25% of Google code is now written by AI. But internal AI use is one way to increase workplace efficiency and cut back on costs, Ashkenazi argued.
"Think not just about the size of the organization but mostly how we operate and how we run the business," Ashkenazi said during the earnings presentation. "I think when you simplify the organization…when we use AI within our own processes and how we get work done, there are some efficiencies or opportunities for efficiencies."
