Friday, March 27, 2009

Google plans sales, marketing job cuts

By Mass High Tech staff

Google Inc. has announced plans to lay off “just under 200” employees globally. The job cuts, which were posted on the official Google blog by Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, were not outlined to show geographic impact, and it is unclear whether the Cambridge location of Google will lose jobs as well.

According to the blog posting headline, Kordestani implies that the job cuts may come to Google’s sales and marketing departments.

The blog posting indicates that Google’s quick growth made for some overlapping work in the jobs that were created, as well as over-investment in growth areas that may have now slowed down due to the recession.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) staffs an engineering, media sales and online sales department in a 60,000-square-foot office in Cambridge. The local site is responsible for developing such products as Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners provide social features for visitors, and mobile phone operating system Android.

The company operates 35 engineering offices, 10 in the United States, but the company encourages “collaborative engineering,” spreading single projects out among developers in several locations, said Cambridge office site director Steve Vinter, last May.

As of its December 2008 financial statement, Google employed slightly more than 20,000 people.