Quiet Cutbacks

"Hundreds" of employees have been let go in the past few months, the company's sources claim -- and, they say, a loophole has allowed Google to keep quiet about the cutbacks. The trick, WebGuild reports, all comes down to categories: Google classifies about 10,000 of its workers as "temporary operational expenses," which means their positions are not official and could be eliminated without public notification. (Google having just over 20,000 full-fledged employees on staff. The additional 10,000 "temporary" positions speculated would bring the actual total to 30,000.)

"Google has hundreds of lawyers figuring out how not to get caught," WebGuild President Daya Baran suggests. "One of them is by moving workers from job to job every few months so that their status remains temporary. That is why you probably have never spoken to the same person twice at Google and that is also why there is somebody new on the job and most times you know more about their job than they do," he says.

Google has yet to publicly comment on any of the speculation.

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