Google recently announced further cutbacks to employee perks, but staff say the company has been pulling back on freebies for years

• Google is cutting back cafe opening hours and reducing how often staff can get their laptops replaced.
• But staff say that cuts to their perks have been going on for years.

After years of shaping the trend of luxurious company perks, Google has been stripping back its freebies amid a huge cost-cutting push. While some of the policies — like cutting back its cafe opening hours and reducing how often staff can get their laptops replaced — are recent developments, current and former Google workers told Insider that the company had slowly been cutting back on perks and discretionary spending for years.

"Google was one of the pioneers of the work culture where the employees are pampered," an East Coast engineer who has worked at Google for around 15 years told Insider. "Then slowly the perks have been going away. They were being stripped down gradually."

Some temporary cuts, such as changes to catering, a pause on free massages, and the closure of its on-campus shuttle buses and fitness centers, were necessitated by the pandemic, but workers told Insider that the changes went beyond this.

Many of the current and former workers spoke to Insider on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment and because they worried it could hinder their job search. Despite the cutbacks, they said they were largely still happy with the perks and benefits offered by Google.

"Even now that a lot of the perks have gone away, I still think this is an amazing place to work," the East Coast engineer said. "And it's still like Disneyland, despite the changes."

"As we've consistently said, we set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and will continue that into the future," Ryan Lamont, a Google spokesperson, told Insider.

Food, travel, and socials have been cut

Google has been credited with starting the trend of free, high-quality corporate catering. Some staff, however, told Insider that the food options at Google appear to have been pared back in recent years.

"Food was the greatest perk at Google," Paul Baker, a video producer who was laid off in January, said. He said that Google's food budgets were "scaled back" towards the end of the 2010s and it stopped offering as many vegan entrees.

A laid-off Google Cloud sales engineer said that since the pandemic he had noticed that the food options Google offered at its Cambridge, Boston office were "significantly reduced from their pre-pandemic heights," with little variation between weeks. Other current and former workers, however, disputed these claims and said the food at their offices was still high quality.

In recent months, Google has curbed its spending on employee travel, restricting it to "business critical" trips.

In the past, for travel between two of Google's biggest offices on the West Coast, "it was just assumed if you had a good reason to go, do it," an engineer who's been with Google for more than 15 years told Insider. "Now, we need permission."

A laid-off sales consultant told Insider that travel budgets had been "very tight," with travel for client engagements even being questioned. "It was a struggle to get certain things approved, even lunches, dinners or holiday gifts for the clients," they said. "That was definitely never a problem in the past."

Team socials and events were cut back, too.

Baker told Insider that his team had previously had annual outings. "Then once the pandemic hit, any and all parties ceased," Baker said. "We had a 2022 outing planned in Texas, then it was redacted."

A laid-off engineer told Insider that even during his short stint at Google – just over a year – he had noticed team budgets for discretionary expenses being cut, such as meals with colleagues.

He said, however, that his team valued bonding and mental health "and would keep allowing us to expense reasonable occasional dinners." Another laid-off Googler previously told Insider that "fun budgets" had been slashed and perks became "less interesting" during his eight years at the company.

A former technical program manager told Insider that she was surprised by the "lack" of company merchandise she got when she onboarded at Google in 2022. "I got a really cheap jacket and backpack, that's all," she said.

Holiday parties were largely scrapped

One of the biggest changes Google has made over the years was cutting back on holiday gifts and parties, staff told Insider.

Some workers said they'd previously received phones from the company.

"Then it kind of became surplus hardware inventory that wasn't selling well," like the first Google Watch and the Sony Blu-ray player with Google TV, an engineer said.

Nicholas Whitaker, who worked in Google's people development team before being laid off, told Insider that the last physical gift he got was a LG smart watch back in 2010, "and that was a big kerfuffle when it happened, because in years prior they gave cash."

Over time, Google began to replace the gadgets and cash bonuses with $400 donations to a charity of their choice, current and former workers said.

"I never received any type of holiday gift or bonus in my entire time there," a laid-off worker who'd been at Google for more than five years said.

Baker said when he was a temp his manager got a Google gadget and cash in 2015 and a Pixel watch in 2016.

"It made me super excited to get a cash bonus or a flashy gift if/when I returned to Google," Baker told Insider. "But no end of the year holiday cash bonuses came."

"Getting a fun gift was a thing of the past," Baker added.

Most long-term Google employees told Insider that they didn't mind the switch to charity donations.

"In the early days there was a lot of resistance and complaining about it, and doubt about the reasons behind the move," Whitaker told Insider.

"Most people I know thought it was more of a cost-saving measure and a PR thing than anything but went along with it because they didn't have a choice. It's tricky, because it's a privilege to even get a bonus or a gift as a perk, so people don't want to come off as ungrateful and ungenerous, but like a lot of initiatives it was spun as something good for the employees.

As well as shifting from gifts to donations, Google also cut back on holidays parties.

One former employee said that, in 2020 and 2021, staff in their division of Google Cloud were invited to virtual chocolate, wine, and tea tastings.

"This did not happen in 2022," they said.

The former sales consultant said that Google's "lavish" holiday parties were "fully cut" after the pandemic. One laid-off technical program manager said for her team's 2022 holiday party they "just met in the office" and had food from the company's cafeteria, while Baker said staff "were forbidden to bring a plus one" to the Los Angeles' office's holiday party in Hollywood.

Workers may feel 'tricked' when perks get cut

"We get bombarded with offers on LinkedIn recruiters and other companies," the East Coast engineer said, but Googlers don't accept them "because we don't want to leave a company that we felt protected us." This stability has been lost because of the company's recent mass layoffs, he said.

"If we lost most of the perks, and now the only distinguishing factor was the sense of security that we had, what is left to distinguish this company from any other company, any other recruiter that contacts us with a good offer?" he said.

Google isn't alone. Companies generally start reducing their perks as they become bigger to maximize shareholder profit, business-psychology expert Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic told Insider. Bruce Daisley, an author on workplace culture and former Twitter VP, added that Google may have dropped some perks to avoid the need to have as many layoffs.

And the pandemic has also caused a shift in the provision of perks across the industry, with companies moving away from so-called "life on site" perks like free food and team socials which only benefit people who come to the office.

The experts said that instead of freebies, workers are now demanding flexibility such as being able to work from home or from overseas. Google, however, seems to be moving in the opposite direction, having recently told employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and "several other US locations" to return to the office for at least three days a week.

For workers who do still visit the office, the loss of some perks in favor of remote-work benefits could be frustrating, Jennifer Moss, an author who focuses on workplace culture and burnout, told Insider. She said staff notice even small changes to their work perks. "The worst thing you can do is change the coffee," she said.

Daisley, in contrast, said that non-paid benefits "don't really have any correlation with people's level of engagement with their jobs."

Workers may still feel "tricked" when some of their perks are taken away, Chamorro-Premuzic said, but the current environment of the tech industry – which has laid off tens of thousands of workers in recent months – means staff likely won't complain.

Were you recently laid off by Google? Or do you still work there? Contact this reporter at gdean@insider.com.