Laura de Vesine, a senior site reliability engineer, recently resigned from her position at Google over issues with the company’s inflexible policies.
Last fall, de Vesine and her team were told they would need to relocate to North Carolina from Google’s Sunnyvale, California office. Initially, the team was told they would have to take a 15% salary cut, but that grew to 25% by late March. Then, the relocation plans were scrapped.
The back-and-forth has been frustrating for de Vesine, who added that Google isn’t keeping the best interest of their employees in mind.
“This feeling that I can’t realistically leave the Bay Area and work for Google is enough for me to have decided to leave,” said de Vesine. “It’s the fact that Google doesn’t prioritize the needs of human beings. The fact that we have lives outside of work, that people actually have families.”
Back in May, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Google’s plans to shift to a hybrid work arrangement that requires employees to work from their offices three days each week starting in September.
However, as the company sorts out where employees will work and how much they will earn, Google workers have said that tension over this transition has reached a boiling point.
This grew tenfold last week when senior executive Urs Hölzle revealed his plans to work remotely from New Zealand. Many employees felt that this reserved privilege for leadership left lower-level staffers in the dust and highlighted the company’s hypocritical policies.
