Google forcing some remote workers to come back 3 days a week or lose their jobs
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet Inc., speaks at the inaugural 2024 Business, Government, and Society Forum at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Stanford, California, on April 3, 2024.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
Five years removed from the onset of the Covid pandemic, Google is demanding that some remote employees return to the office if they want to keep their jobs and avoid being part of broader cost cuts at the company.
Several units within Google have told remote staffers that their roles may be at risk if they don’t start showing up at the closest office for a hybrid work schedule, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. Some of those employees were previously approved for remote work.
As the pandemic slips further into the rearview mirror, more companies are tightening their restrictions on remote work, forcing some staffers who moved to distant locations to reconsider their priorities if they want to maintain their employment. The change in tone is particularly acute in the tech industry, which jumped so aggressively into flexible work arrangements in 2020 that San Francisco’s commercial real estate market is still struggling to recover.
Google began offering some U.S. full-time employees voluntary buyouts at the beginning of 2025, and some remote staffers were told that would be their only option if they didn’t return to the nearest office at least three days a week.
The latest threats land at a time when Google and many of its tech peers are looking to slash costs while simultaneously pouring money into artificial intelligence, which requires hefty expenditures on infrastructure and technical talent. Since conducting widespread layoffs in early 2023, Google has undertaken targeted cuts across various teams, emphasizing the importance of increased AI investments.
As of the end of last year, Google had about 183,000 employees, down from roughly 190,000 two years earlier.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin told AI workers in February that they should be in the office every weekday, with 60 hours a week being “the sweet spot of productivity,” according to a memo viewed by CNBC. Brin said the company has to “turbocharge” efforts to keep up with AI competition, which “has accelerated immensely.”
Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said the decisions around remote worker return demands are based on individual teams and not a companywide policy.
“As we’ve said before, in-person collaboration is an important part of how we innovate and solve complex problems,” Mencini said in a statement to CNBC. “To support this, some teams have asked remote employees that live near an office to return to in-person work three days a week.”
According to one recent notice, employees in Google Technical Services were told that they’re required to switch to a hybrid office schedule or take a voluntary exit package. Remote employees in the unit are being offered a one-time paid relocation expense to move within 50 miles of an office.
Remote employees in human resources, or what Google calls People Operations, who live within 50 miles of an office, are required to be in person on a hybrid basis by mid-April or their role will be eliminated, according to an internal memo. Staffers in that unit who are approved for remote work and live more than 50 miles away from an office can keep their current arrangements, but will have to go hybrid if they want new roles at the company.
Google previously offered a voluntary exit program to U.S.-based full-time employees in People Operations, starting in March, according to a memo sent by HR chief Fiona Cicconi in February.
That came after the company said in January that it would be offering voluntary exit packages to full-time employees in the U.S. in the Platforms and Devices group, which includes Android, Chrome and products like Fitbit and Nest. The unit has made cuts to nearly two-dozen teams as of this month. While internal correspondence indicated that remote work was a factor in the layoffs, Mencini said it was not a main consideration for the changes.
A year ago, Google combined its Android unit with its hardware group under the leadership of Rick Osterloh, a senior vice president. Osterloh said in January that the voluntary exit plan may be a fit for employees who struggle with the hybrid work schedule.
Mencini told CNBC that, since the groups merged, the team has “focused on becoming more nimble and operating more effectively and this included making some job reductions in addition to the voluntary exit program.” She added that the unit continues to hire in the U.S. and globally.
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
South Korea’s data protection authority has concluded that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek collected personal information from local users and transferred it overseas without their permission.
The authority, the Personal Information Protection Commission, released its written findings on Thursday in connection with a privacy and security review of DeepSeek.
It follows DeepSeek’s removal of its chatbot application from South Korean app stores in February at the recommendation of PICP. The agency said DeepSeek had committed to cooperate on its concerns.
During DeepSeek’s presence in South Korea, it transferred user data to several firms in China and the U.S. without obtaining the necessary consent from users or disclosing the practice, the PIPC said.
The agency highlighted a particular case in which DeepSeek transferred information from user-written AI prompts, as well as device, network, and app information, to a Chinese cloud service platform named Beijing Volcano Engine Technology Co.
While the PIPC identified Beijing Volcano Engine Technology Co. as “an affiliate” of TikTok-owner ByteDance, the information privacy watchdog noted in a statement that the cloud platform “is a separate legal entity and has no relation to ByteDance,” according to a Google translation.
According to PIPC, DeepSeek said it used Beijing Volcano Engine Technology’s services to improve the security and user experience of its app, but later blocked the transfer of AI prompt information from April 10.
DeepSeek and ByteDance did not immediately respond to inquiries from CNBC.
The Hangzhou-based AI startup took the world by storm in January when it unveiled its R1 reasoning model, rivaling the performance of Western competitors despite the company’s claims that it was trained for relatively low costs and with less advanced hardware.
However, the app’s rising popularity quickly triggered national security and data concerns outside China due to Beijing’s requirement for domestic firms to share data with the PRC. Cybersecurity experts have also flagged data vulnerabilities in the app and voiced concerns about the company’s privacy policy.
PIPC on Thursday said it had issued a corrective recommendation to DeepSeek, which includes requests to immediately destroy AI prompt information transferred to the Chinese company in question and to set up legal protocols for transferring personal information overseas.
When the data protection authority announced the removal of DeepSeek from local app stores, it signaled that the app would become available again once the company implemented the necessary updates to comply with local data protection policy.
That investigation followed reports that some South Korean government agencies had banned employees from using DeepSeek on work devices. Other global government departments, including in Taiwan, Australia, and the U.S., have reportedly instituted similar bans.
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