Google tells employees more of them will be at risk for low performance ratings next year
CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai during press conference at the Chancellery in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022.
Mateusz Wlodarczyk | Nurphoto | Getty Images
More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC.
In a recent Google all-hands meeting and in a separate presentation last week, executives presented more details of its new performance review process. Under the new system, Google estimates 6% of full-time employees will fall into a low-ranking category that puts them at higher risk for corrective action, versus 2% before. Simultaneously, it will be harder to achieve high marks: Google projects 22% percent of employees will be rated with in one of the two highest categories, versus 27% before.
related investing news
As an example, in order to make the new, highest rated category, “Transformative Impact,” an employee must have “achieved the near-impossible” and contributed “more than we thought possible.”
Earlier this year, Google announced the new process for performance reviews, known as Google Reviews and Development, or GRAD.
But CNBC recently reported that employees have complained about procedural and technical issues with GRAD close to the year-end deadlines, making them anxious they won’t be accurately rated. The anxiety is compounded by a wave of layoffs in the tech industry. While Google has so far avoided the widespread job cuts that have hit other tech companies like Meta, employees have grown anxious if they could be next.
In a December all-hands meeting on the topic, employees expressed frustration with executives, who have long touted transparency but are not providing direct answers to questions about headcount. Some employees believe new performance review system might be a way for the company to reduce headcount.
Headcount has been a subject of employee concern throughout the latter part of 2022. CEO Sundar Pichai found himself on the defensive in September, as he was forced to explain the company’s changing position after years of supercharged growth. Executives said at the time that there would be small cuts, and they didn’t rule out layoffs.
And in November, a number of employees in an all-hands meeting asked for clarification on executives’ plans around headcount, and even asked if executives mismanaged headcount when Google grew its workforce by 24% year-over-year in Q3 2022.
As of Q3, the company employed 186,779 full-time employees. It also employs a similar amount of contractors.
Recent documents about the GRAD also say the company will be looking at bonuses, pay and equity and expects to “spend more per capita on compensation overall.” It also states the company still plans on paying within the top 5% to 10% of market rates.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘A lot of distress and anger’
At the company’s most recent all-hands meeting on Dec. 8, many of the top-rated questions described stress around year-end performance reviews, according to audio of the meeting obtained by CNBC. The questions also suggested some employees don’t trust the company’s leadership is being transparent in how it handles headcount.
“Why did Google push support check-in quotas to front line managers days before the deadline?,” one employee asked, in a question read aloud by Pichai. “I’ve been through a lot in Google in 5+ years but this is a new low.”
“It seems like a lot of last-minute support check-ins were forced through part of Cloud in order to meet a quota, causing a lot of distress and anger,” another employee asked. “With only two weeks to correct course, how is this helpful feedback? How do we prevent this from happening in the future?”
“The support check-in process is confusing, increasingly becoming a cause of stress and anxiety in Googlers, especially given the current economic situation and rumors around layoffs,” said another top-rated employee question.
Earlier this month, CNBC reported employees began receiving “support check-ins” often associated with lower performance ratings in the final days leading up to year-end deadlines. They also said executives changed parts of the process in the final days.
“I know it’s been bumpy,” Google’s chief people officer Fiona Cicconi, eventually said, briefly acknowledging the issues with GRAD in a recent all-hands meeting.
“It’s not ideal to have support check-ins occur so late in the review cycle and we know that people need time to absorb the feedback and take action on it,” admitted Cicconi, adding that “Googlers should have plenty of time to course-correct.”
Several employees also asked executives whether they had quotas for placing people in lower performance categories in order to reduce headcount in 2023. Even though executives said they don’t have quotas, it didn’t seem to convince employees.
One question asked executives if Google was becoming “a stack-ranking company like Amazon,” referring to the process of using quotas to place employees in certain performance buckets.
“Uncertainties around GRAD processes have been putting a lot of pressure on lower level managers to pass down information” about performance reviews and sometimes force “conflicting items,” another highly-rated question stated.
Another read: “Layoffs across the industry has been a topic impacting Googlers, raising stress, anxiety and burnout,” another read. There’s been no official comms on this, which raises even more concern around this. When will the company address this topic?”
But executives largely avoided answering the questions directly. CEO Sundar Pichai kept saying he “doesn’t know what the future holds.”
“What we’ve been trying hard to do is we are trying to prioritize where we can so we are set up to better weather the storm, regardless of what’s ahead,” Pichai said. “We really don’t know what the future holds so unfortunately I cannot make forward looking commitments but everything we’ve been planning on as a company for the past six to seven months has been do all the hard work to try and work our way through this as best as possible so, that’s all I can say.”
Technology
Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Bitmine (BMNR) 1-month
The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
WATCH: H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater’s Gene Munster
Technology
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike