Nearly 100 Google employees gathered on the company's Mountain View campus at noon Thursday, July 16, holding signs reading "Googlers for Job Security," while Alphabet Workers Union leaders delivered a petition signed by 4,500 workers to CEO Sundar Pichai's office.
The campus sits minutes from Palo Alto High School and Henry M. Gunn High School. The rally unfolded as UC and CSU applications open in October and PAUSD families face a shifting calculus about whether computer science remains a reliable path.
Alphabet Workers Union president Parul Koul, a software engineer, told reporters the campaign began in January 2023 when Google laid off 12,000 employees "overnight." She said the company's valuation has grown from over $1 trillion to over $4 trillion during the same period, according to KQED.
"These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run," Koul said at the press conference.
What the petition demands
The petition calls for guaranteed severance, voluntary exit packages before mandatory layoffs, the option to take severance as extended paid leave to preserve healthcare and immigration status, and an end to Google's bell-curve performance review system known as GRAD.
Pichai did not meet with the group. Union leaders described a productive conversation with one of his staff members, who called the petition "the largest piece of employee feedback that Google has received about job security," according to the Guardian. Google did not respond to KQED's request for comment.
Google has let go of between 1,500 and 3,000 engineers in 2026 alone, according to TechCrunch reporting cited by KQED. The company's March 2026 SEC filing lists over 190,000 employees.
Entry-level hiring dries up across Silicon Valley
The protest comes as entry-level tech jobs disappear locally. In May, LinkedIn and Intuit announced plans to cut over 800 employees in Mountain View alone. About two-thirds of LinkedIn's 606 California layoffs were in software development roles, according to Palo Alto Online. One industry tracker estimated 100,000 tech jobs have been eliminated nationally in 2026.
ZipRecruiter data cited in a Wednesday, July 15, KQED report showed the share of entry-level tech job postings has fallen from 8.1% to 7.4% over the past year, while senior-level postings rose from 38.8% to 43.1%. More than a quarter of employers ask for AI skills, nearly double the share a year ago.
As the Ledger reported July 13, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab's Canaries Dashboard shows entry-level software developer employment for workers ages 22 to 25 down close to 20% from its late-2022 peak.
Nobel Barakat, a Google software engineer, described the mood among colleagues at Thursday's rally. "I see worried people, grateful to still have a job, do the best they can to keep it," he told Business Insider.
Dan Freedman, another Google engineer who works on AI tools for designers, said that after AI was added to his job requirements, he feared it could replace him. "I have to wonder if I'm next," Freedman said.
